The Human Shakespeare and Troilus and Cressida

Abstract

HE year ig3o saw the publication of two very influential books on Shakespeare which suggest polar interpretations of Troilus -6 64 and Cressida. G. Wilson Knight's The Wheel of Fire (Oxford) explains the play as an elaborate set of contrasts erected upon a basic antithesis between the Greeks as representative of the intellect and resultant cynicism, and the Trojans as representative of intuition and romantic faith. Such an analysis naturally glorifies the conduct of Troilus, whose constant love is hallowed, and of the Trojans collectively, who stand for beauty and worth. The other book is Lily B. Campbell's Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion (Cambridge). Although Miss Campbell does not herself discuss Troilus and Cressida, the ideas which she expresses form a frame of reference in which I think she would be willing to examine any Elizabethan play. She presents an extended explication of Elizabethan moral philosophy in terms of the eternal warfare between the appetitive and the rational parts of the soul-the passion and the reason. To the critic who is committed to the view that when human conduct is determined by anything but reason, the results are inevitably catastrophic, the behavior of Troilus, Hector, and the Trojans collectively must appear faulty (whether evil or merely ridiculous) because they are ruled by emotion, by a idealism, by instinct, by anything else but reason. Such a critic may find Troilus, for example, personally sympathetic but morally and intellectually to be pitied; or he may, seeking to make his sympathies and his philosophy agree, find nothing admirable at all in Troilus, Hector, and the Trojans. Since 1930, the interpretations deriving from Miss Campbell's work have had the better of it. John Russell Brown, discussing in Shakespeare Survey the interpretation of Shakespeare's comedies during the first half of this century, comments that Knight's analysis has not been generally accepted, and cites several scholars who have taken the opposite point of view.1 In the same volume of Shakespeare Survey, a few pages later, Kenneth Muir, though he finds both Troilus and Hector sympathetic characters, writes, Certainly the play is meant to expose the false glamour of sex and war, and later he speaks of the play as an exposure of 'idealism'.2 The dominance of the philosophy of reason over passion (or of intellect over