Visual Patterns and Linking Analogues In Troilus and Cressida

Abstract

T ROILUS AND CRESSIDA, LIKE EVERY DRAMA WRITTEN FOR PERFORMANCE, conveys information about behaviors, tensions, and predominating values of the fictive world not only through words but also through stage pictures and visual patterns that constitute what Alan C. Dessen calls a play's for the eye. 1 That this visual language has been generally overlooked by critics of Troilus and Cressida should not surprise us, since the play's earliest commentators, who fixed many of the critical attitudes that still prevail today, had never seen the play performed. Examination of the visual dimension of Troilus and Cressida challenges many assumptions about the play and many attitudes towards the characters that scholarship has nurtured over the past century. When we take a good look at the main characters, they become more complicated, more ambiguous, than either the Troy legend or established critical views allow. Visual patterns also offer us a new perspective on Troilus's artistic merit: we see that there is method in the play's tonal shift from light to dark and method in the traditionally problematic violence of the fifth act, which makes sense as a sudden reversal of the play's martial imagery up to that point. In short, attention to the play's for the eye forces us to reconsider its characters and events, and to discover how verbal and visual effects work in concert to produce for the spectator a coherent dramatic experience that rests upon ambivalent and shifting responses to the characters and events as they unfold during performance. Several recurring patterns in Troilus and Cressida serve to remind the spectator of basic conditions of the play world. One of the most striking, and perhaps the most challenging to the status of this play as morally problematical, is the handing-over of Cressida. In III.ii, we watch Pandarus hand her over to Troilus who, in consent with the Trojan Council's decision to transfer her to the enemy camp, delivers her up to Diomedes at IV.iv. Diomedes, in turn, gives her over to the Greeks who, perhaps literally as well as metaphorically, pass her around among themselves until Diomedes takes her away to her father (IV.v). The pattern is so firmly established that by the time Calchas turns her over to Diomedes at V.ii, we need not even be shown the physical handingover; her father's offstage remarks suffice. The continual conveying of Cressida from one male to another makes a vivid visual statement of the girl's position in her world. She is essentially powerless to control and direct her own life, shown repeatedly to be in the hands of others.