The Trojans embody the chivalric ideal.* The play opens with Troilus, staying home from battle, too lovesick to fight. Fighting is treated as a thing men do when the mood strikes them and not a matter of duty to protect Troy. Men wear a token from their lady and dedicate their heroic deeds in her honor. Hector is the truest embodiment of the ideal. During a truce, he challenges any Greek champion to duel in single combat, to show who is braver, and whose lady is more beautiful and of higher character. He spares all who yield, never strikes an opponent when he is down, and even gives pause to let the other fighter catch his breath.
Troilus is a young idealist in his model. He also follows the chivalric ideal in that he loves a lady, praises all her virtues and excellences, and wears her token, a sleeve. Paris also comes across as a very nice guy.
The Greeks are moving in the modern direction. Their army has been bogged down for a long time and they are growing impatient. Achilles has been refusing to fight and mocking the leaders. Ulysses (Odysseus) proposes that the Greeks send Ajax forward as their champion instead to goad Achilles into action. Certainly neither Achilles nor Ajax meets the ideal of chivalry at all. Ajax is described as a "mongrel, beef-witted lord" with "no more brain than I have in mine elbows," and he acts like a brute and thug. Achilles has fallen into arrogance, mocks his superiors, and almost certainly has a gay relationship with Patroclus. Nor does Ulysses' scheme to manipulate these two seem knightly.
But above all else is Thersites. Thersites appears as a character in the Illiad, a common soldier, deformed and repulsive, but he speaks the truth to power. Shakespeare's Thersites is even more repulsive, and supremely vile and scurrilous in his language, but he sees through everyone else's failings and speaks truth to power, albeit in repulsive, disease-ridden terms. His dismisses Achilles and Ajax with, "Hector have a great catch, if he knock out either of your brains: a' were as good crack a fusty nut with no kernel." And "If Troy be not taken till these two undermine it, the walls will stand till they fall of themselves." He dismisses the whole war with:
Here is such patchery, such juggling and such knavery! all the argument is a cuckold and a whore; a good quarrel to draw emulous factions and bleed to death upon. Now, the dry serpigo [a skin disease] on the subject! and war and lechery confound all!In assessing his commanders he says:
Here's Agamemnon, an honest fellow enough and one that loves quails; but he has not so much brain as earwax: and the goodly transformation of Jupiter there, his brother, the bull,--the primitive statue, and oblique memorial of cuckolds; a thrifty shoeing-horn in a chain, hanging at his brother's leg,--to what form but that he is, should wit larded with malice and malice forced with wit turn him to? To an ass, were nothing; he is both ass and ox: to an ox, were nothing; he is both ox and ass. To be a dog, a mule, a cat, a fitchew, a toad, a lizard, an owl, a puttock, or a herring without a roe, I would not care; but to be Menelaus, I would conspire against destiny.And his curses are revolting:
Now, the rotten diseases of the south, the guts-griping, ruptures, catarrhs, loads o' gravel i' the back, lethargies, cold palsies, raw eyes, dirt-rotten livers, wheezing lungs, bladders full of imposthume, sciaticas, limekilns i' the palm, incurable bone-ache, and the rivelled fee-simple of the tetter, take and take again such preposterous discoveries!Even in Troy, one catches hints that chivalry is not all it seems. When Troilus proclaims his love for Cressida in extravagant terms, Cressida's uncle Pandarus interjects in the most prosaic and cynical terms. He brings them together and watches over, a leering voyeur.
The Greeks observe the chivalric ideal of courtesy during the duel, but Ulysses has no illusions about Cressida's character and arranges for Troilus to see her transfer her allegiance to Diomedes and give him the sleeve. The shock causes Troilus to abandon chivalry for total war. He tells Hector:
TROILUS
Brother, you have a vice of mercy in you,
Which better fits a lion than a man.
HECTOR
What vice is that, good Troilus? chide me for it.
TROILUS
When many times the captive Grecian falls,
Even in the fan and wind of your fair sword,
You bid them rise, and live.
HECTOR
O,'tis fair play.
TROILUS
Fool's play, by heaven, Hector.
HECTOR
How now! how now!
TROILUS
For the love of all the gods,
Let's leave the hermit pity with our mothers,
And when we have our armours buckled on,
The venom'd vengeance ride upon our swords,
Spur them to ruthful work, rein them from ruth.
HECTOR
Fie, savage, fie!
TROILUSHector is alarmed by his brother's tone and says he should not fight today, but Troilus goes out, hunting for Diomedes with Cressida's sleeve. Troilus' warning to disregard chivalry and fight to win proves true -- when Hector rests at the end of the day and takes his armor off, Achilles ambushes and kills him. And we end knowing that Troy is doomed without Hector to defend it and Troilus abandoning all chivalry and only craving revenge.
Hector, then 'tis wars.
Troilus and Cressida is a deeply cynical play, particularly because Thersites' cynical comments go unanswered, including his outrage that the war should be fought all over "a cuckold and a whore." We see Medieval chivalry give way to modern total war before our eyes. And yet the question remains, to what extent did Shakespeare actually believe in the chivalric ideal? Did he see it as a noble and glorious thing of the past, tragically lost in these modern, degenerate days? Or as a mere literary convention, never practicable in the real world? Someone in our class pointed out that Shakespeare was a contemporary of Miguel Cervantes, and that Troilus and Cressida was roughly contemporary with Don Quixote, which thoroughly skewered the knightly romance (already generally seen as old-fashioned and rather foolish) as utterly absurd in the real world.
Both plays begin with a chorus setting the general story. In Troilus and Cressida, the chorus merely explains that the scene is in Troy and recounts the familiar story. In Henry V, the chorus describes the grandeur and epic scale of the story he wants to present, and apologizes for the limits of the stage. It seems fair to say that these things did not have the same reality to Shakespeare when writing about an ancient war in a distant and exotic land as when writing about a comparatively recent war in familiar lands. Troilus and Cressida had elements of a fairy tale; Henry V is absolutely real to the author and his audience.
There are no one-on-one duels in Henry V, no fights to prove the worthiness of one's lady, no lady's favor that a knight wears on his crest to dedicate to her. Two men (one of them the king in disguise) do were gloves on their hats, but only as a challenge to start a fight. The incident that is the immediate pretext for war is every bit as frivolous as stealing Helen. Henry claims to be the rightful King of France. The French offer him a chest containing tribute not to attack. And it turns out to contain -- tennis balls. This insult furnishes the immediate pretext for war.
The harsh realities of war are portrayed in unsparing terms. We hear about sieges, cannons, undermining (i.e., digging under the city walls to plan explosives) and other practical matters of war that go unmentioned in Troilus and Cressida. Henry warns the city of Harfleur against holding out after it becomes clear there are no reinforcements:
Take pity of your town and of your people,Never do we hear such graphic terms when Troilus anticipates the fall of Troy.
Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command;
Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace
O'erblows the filthy and contagious clouds
Of heady murder, spoil and villany.
If not, why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;
Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls,
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused
Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry
At Herod's bloody-hunting slaughtermen.
What say you? will you yield, and this avoid,
Or, guilty in defence, be thus destroy'd?
Harfleur surrenders. The English army, hungry and stricken with dysentery, makes a forced march to Calais. Henry warns his soldiers to commit no outrages against the countryside and executes one for looting from a church. They await fearfully for the coming battle. Common soldiers know all too well that theirs are the lives on the line when the fighting starts, while the nobility will only be captured, held in honorable confinement, and ransomed. Some common soldiers even dare grumble against the king:
But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at such a place;' some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of any thing, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it; whom to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.Again, this is quite graphic imagery. There is none of Thersites' vulgarity here, but it portrays the real horrors of death and wounds in a way that Troilus and Cressida never does.** The English, half-starved and exhausted from the march, face a French army that is fresh and outnumbers them five to one. The French urge the English to leave while they still can. Henry replies that even if his army is slaughtered, so many bodies will breed a plague and conquer France even in death! (Gross!) Battle ensues. Both sides commit war crimes. Henry orders the execution of French prisoners after they surrender. The French attack the baggage train and kill boys to young to fight. Henry does not even have the mitigation of killing in hot blood -- he first orders the execution of French prisoners before learning that under age boys have been killed.
In the battle itself we see no one-on-one duels between great lords, only a fight between common soldiers. At the end of the battle, all is in confusion and at first the English don't even know who won. They only realize they have won when the French herald approaches asking leave to retrieve their dead to bury. Horses have fallen as well as knights, "[T]heir wounded steeds/Fret fetlock deep in gore and with wild rage/Yerk out their armed heels at their dead masters/Killing them twice."
When the war is over, most of the companions of Henry's youth have been killed. Pistol, the sole survivor, finds that his girlfriend has died "of a malady of France." He is left to make his living pimping and stealing. He is scarred from a beating for insubordination, and plans to claim the scars were gotten in combat and pass himself off as a war hero. The French desperately desire peace:
Her [France's] vine, the merry cheerer of the heart,Peace is concluded, with the current French king to rule to the end of his days. His son is declared illegitimate, and Henry marries his daughter and is declared his heir. As the chorus acknowledges, it is all in vain. Henry will die young and leave a baby to succeed him. All his victories will be reversed and England will fall into civil war.
Unpruned dies; her hedges even-pleach'd,
Like prisoners wildly overgrown with hair,
Put forth disorder'd twigs; her fallow leas
The darnel, hemlock and rank fumitory
Doth root upon, while that the coulter rusts
That should deracinate such savagery;
The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth
The freckled cowslip, burnet and green clover,
Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank,
Conceives by idleness and nothing teems
But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burs,
Losing both beauty and utility.
And as our vineyards, fallows, meads and hedges,
Defective in their natures, grow to wildness,
Even so our houses and ourselves and children
Have lost, or do not learn for want of time,
The sciences that should become our country;
But grow like savages,--as soldiers will
That nothing do but meditate on blood,--
To swearing and stern looks, diffused attire
And every thing that seems unnatural.
Which to reduce into our former favour
You are assembled: and my speech entreats
That I may know the let, why gentle Peace
Should not expel these inconveniences
And bless us with her former qualities.
So the obvious question remains. Why is it the chest-thumping, flag-waving patriotic play Henry V so much more graphic and honest in its portrayal of the horrors of war than the deeply cynical anti-war play Troilus and Cressida? Some have suggested that Shakespeare really disliked war, and that his dislike of war comes through even in a supposed celebration of it. Or that Henry V is only a patriotic play on the surface, and that it is far more critical of Henry and his wars than it appears at first glance. But the question remains -- why so much more a graphic portrayal of a war the author at least pretends to support than one he opposes. Not even Shakespeare's portrayal of civil war in his other history plays is so grim.
My guess is that two things are at work. One is that some of the horrors of war were deeply embedded in the popular narrative of Henry's victory. Victory is exciting in proportion to how much it overcomes the odds. Henry's victory at Agincourt gains its power, not only from the English being outnumbered by the French, but also by their weakened condition, from hunger, disease, and forced march. Just as we honor George Washington, not for the victorious battles he fought (he didn't), but for enduring cold, hunger, and disease and still holding his rag-tag barefoot army together, so would Shakespeare's contemporaries honor Henry for his victory over hunger, disease, and fatigue as well as an outnumbering army. And after all, these aspects of war should be remembered. Every war prior to the 20th Century had more soldiers die of disease from squalid conditions than were killed in battle.
The other is that sometimes imagination is just no match for reality. Even for a writer of Shakespeare's genius, details come a lot easier when you are writing about something you really know. Shakespeare knew the grim details of the Battle of Agincourt. Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare was essentially writing about an imaginary war. The details just weren't there.
___________________________________________________
*West Europeans in the Middle Ages, and well after, knew their Greek legends mostly as filtered through the Romans. The Romans claimed descent from the Trojans and were therefore biased in their favor. This bias persisted in Shakespeare's time.
**Although, interestingly enough, the Iliad bombards the reader with so many graphic descriptions of death in battle that the mind goes numb to it.
No comments:
Post a Comment