Cassandra and the Language of Prophecy in Troilus and Cressida

Abstract

atsm4)38 TUDENTS of poetic drama are now familiar with that peculiarly Shakespearean form of poetic license which allows characters with markedly different personalities to use similar diction and figurative language in the course of a play. It is by creating and exploiting linguistic patterns which tend to remain relatively independent of the characters who express them that Shakespeare is able to impart to his play-worlds those distinctive thematic, tonal, and atmospheric qualities so characteristic of his drama. To acknowledge this special achievement is not, of course, to question the often highly individualized nature of speech in Shakespearean drama. But it should permit us to observe how the language of a play will usually be more responsible to the vision of the play as a whole than to the existential reality of its unique personalities. Recognizing that the primary allegiance of Shakespeare's language is to the distinctive vision of a play allows us to see how speech in Shakespearean drama is necessarily prophetic in that it cannot help but adumbrate, with increasing clarity, the essential nature of the action as it develops in time. Troilus and Cressida provides a particularly instructive instance of the dynamic interplay between dramatic language and informing vision, for in this play Shakespeare exploits the overdetermined nature of his characters' speech to create and sustain a vision of imminent and radical catastrophe.' This vision occasionally finds a dramatic locus in the utterances of prophets and prophetesses like Thersites and Cassandra, but more often it is expressed through the linguistic fabric of the play. In what follows I will try to show how Shakespeare is able to orchestrate the languages of Troilus so as to make audible in almost every expression a subtle prophecy of inescapable ruin. By the conclusion of the play, as The dragon wing of night o'erspreads the earth and plunges the bloody and fragmented activities on the Dardan plains into terminal darkness, we should feel that the dense implications of disaster within which the characters have moved and spoken have been fully realized.