roilus and Cressida stands with some of the great Shakespearian tragedies, most notably Hamlet, Macbeth, and Lear, as a play in which the ominous nature of the times exerts a heavy, disruptive pressure on the personal destinies of the characters. For half the play the private romance develops in apparent isolation from the surrounding Graeco-Trojan world, but all the while an intimate connection is implied between private passion and public chaos, until finally the two lovers, first Cressida and then Troilus, are forced to surrender to the bitter disposition of the time. The Greeks and Trojans as a whole are represented as two sharply differentiated cultural orders in collision, both committed to an enterprise for which neither can provide an adequate rationale. The Trojans accept the war as an opportunity for personal glorification; the Greeks resign themselves to it as something imposed on them by fate, the unintelligible action of history. The rationalizations of both finally disintegrate before the onslaught of Thersites' all-inclusive cynicism and the predatory self-assertion of Achilles, Ajax, and the vengeful Troilus. In the contrast between the chivalric Trojans and realpolitical Greeks it is tempting to see a suggestion of the political situation in England during the late I500'S and early i6oo's. As William Empson remarks, Troy, like all large towns in Shakespeare's plays, is analogous to London, and its dilemma reflects the author's uneasy premonition of civil war. But of greater significance for us are the implications the play offers as a complex vision of the perennial earthly city, the unregenerate community forever exposed to the errant and self-destructive tendencies of the human will. The two most important determinants of this vision are the contrary modes of thought represented in Troilus and Ulysses, the one essentially passional and idealistic, the other rational and realistic, neither of which in itself can provide a image of the ultimate good and so point the way to the just and charitable society. Although Troilus and Ulysses are the two most fully drawn characters in the play and the chief apologists for their respective parties, there is, significantly, very little interaction between them. Each is confined to his particular plot, Troilus to his private romance and Ulysses to his efforts to physic the unmoveable Achilles, until they are finally brought together in the fifth act to witness Cressida's submission to Diomedes. There, peering into the darkness at the center of the Greek camp, both under the eye of the nihilist Thersites, they observe a repetition of the act that has made them enemies. The incredulous Troilus is forced to watch the true Cressida absorbed into a world wholly governed by the time and mutability, a world Ulysses appears to understand perfectly and tries to turn to political advantage. Ulysses is powerless to assist Troilus in his metaphysical quandry over the two Cressids, for according to his