Anti-Heroics

I just finished Troilus and Cressida last night. It was a very modern-feeling play; I could imagine it written between the two world wars, when artists were generally trashing the progressive vision of human nature, and T.S. Eliot was treating the western canon to a nihilistic mash-up. In a way, Shakespeare mashing up his own great masters (or at least some of them) in T&C by re-presenting the epic story of the Trojan war as a pastiche of human failures. I felt, as I read, as if the characters were struggling to act with chivalry and to fulfill the ideal heroic roles their era called for, but they just couldn't maintain it. Noble dialogue would ensue for a scene or so, and then they would descend into scheming, selfishness, malice, lust, and turpitude. Most often, this seemed to happen when a woman entered the room, or even the conversation. Which brings me to another point: I think that this was the most outright misogynist of Shakespeare's plays that I have ever read, including The Taming of the Shrew. I was trying to think if there is another play in which a woman's actual infidelity is at the center of the drama, and I couldn't think of one. There are lots of instances in which women are falsely accused--e.g., Othello, Winter's Tale, Much Ado--and everybody is very upset by it, but I don't know another play in which female perfidy is so clearly on display. (Admittedly, my knowledge of Shakespeare is not that exhastive, which is one of the reasons I am taking this class, so I would welcome any corrections from the peanut gallery). More than the events of the play, however, the tone of the dialogue really turned on the falsity of women's virtues and the availability of women's bodies, especially Helen's. You would think that if they all despised her so much they would just go home, instead of fighting for ten years.

I do not mean, by all this carping, to say that I utterly disliked the play, or that I was sorry I read it. The characters were all so unpleasant, and their motivations so base (except for Hector, who was kind-of a bore) that reading it aroused a morbid fascination. It was like the attraction of Jersey Shore, I suppose. Also, Shakespeare really knew some good insults, and this was a chance for him to display the best of them. At one point Patroclus calls Thersites (the clown of the play, whose acidic comments about human nature could corrode steel), "you ruinous butt." Further, there are some more poetic speeches, especially about the inevitability of Time and the fragility of human intent, that appear every so often, like jewels flashing out beneath the swirling waters of a polluted and toxic river. "Time has," Ulysses says, "a wallet at his back,/Wherin he puts alms for oblivion,/A great-sized monster of ingratitudes./Those scraps are good deeds past, which are devoured/As fast as they are made, forgot as soon/As done."

Talk about existential angst.