HEN Shakespeare wrote Troilus and Cressida his imagination was full of cross-currents. In twentieth-century critical opinion about play there are currents even more at odds. Their forces seem-bent upon canceling each other out. In a way it can be understood why a reviewer of i960 Stratford-uponAvon production of Troilus and Cressida could find that what its author provides is merely a collection of beautiful speeches and that a good producer of piece must provide on stage the shape which Shakespeare himself missed.' In this essay I confine myself to one poetic concern of Shakespeare's imagination within play, a concern which creates shapes of infinite desire for forming of Troilus. It works strongly and surely, despite cross-currents, to make two figures of Troilus in one. It serves to give Troilus lover and Troilus warrior a recognizable distinctness at same time that it gives them a bond of substance. What one sees in result must have bearing upon one's finding of shape in play as a whole. There will be an advantage in looking first at Troilus lover. When Shakespeare makes Troilus tell Cressida that in love the will is infinite and execution confin'd, and that the desire is boundless and act a slave to limit (III. ii. 88-9o), see concentric circles of application? One is circle of those pretty to which Pandarus is immediately to lead lovers and which Troilus has not long before envisioned in no ordinary way. He has thought of these encounters as about to take place in Elysian fields where he may wallow in lily beds / Propos'd for deserver. In this circle there is a fleshly core of limitless desire, and it is sexual act that must take to be slave to limit. Beyond this is a circle where desirous courtly lover becomes all fire and air as he pictures impossible deeds that will prove his merit to his beloved. Troilus, becoming forgetful of his lily beds, takes us into this farther realm by speaking of bounds set to those undertakings of love in which we vow to weep seas, live in fire, eat rocks, tame tigers-thinking it harder for our mistress to devise imposition enough than for us to undergo any difficulty imposed. And beyond that is still another circle where, again to draw upon words of Troilus, desire even challenges mutability and strives to convert love into a fair faith by which beloved as well as lover will keep