Placed in between his history plays and tragedy plays in the First Folio, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida eludes both genres in its attempts at bringing to the stage a legend that has been through so many iterations that it transcends the category of historiography altogether. Troilus and Cressida is Shakespeare’s interpretation of the Trojan war, presenting all the famous Trojan and Greek heroes on the Elizabethan stage; however, as criticisms of the play highlight, Shakespeare twists these heroes into selfish and fractured individuals who have departed from their heroic origins. The play runs into these issues when having to metatextually (text that reflects on itself) confront its predecessors. This paper seeks to examine this issue through a metatheatrical (theater which draws attention to itself/its unreality) lens by utilizing the character Ulysses as a point of reference throughout the play. Through a metatheatrical lens, this work uncovers a model of performativity that Ulysses introduces as being at the crux of the problem of these characters’ fragmentations; without the constant performance of these heroic figures, a loss of audience interest will bring the one thing a story is powerless against—oblivion.

In his chapter “Marginalization: Laudatory Epic and the Nature of Power in the Early Renaissance” Craig Kallendorf focuses on the reception of the epic poem Sphortias by the Italian Renaissance humanist Francesco Filelfo. Kallendorf states that there is a problem in the fact that critics viewed the work as an “encomiastic” poem, meaning that it was written with the sole purpose of praising its hero (Kallendorf 20). Kallendorf discusses how this is a problem because it assumes that this type of work should be written with the accuracy of a historiography even though it is poetry; furthermore, it assumes that one can easily access an objective account of what transpired (during the moment in history that the poem is about) without considering how positions of power can work to alter truth (Kallendorf 22). Kallendorf argues that Filelfo’s epic poem is informed by the power-relationships that influenced his financial situation, that questioning the authenticity of his representation of Sforza’s story is futile because of the “constraints of power” that affect Filelfo’s attempts at seeing and presenting truth (Kallendorf 24). The translation of the Troy legend is an exemplar of these tensions because of its long literary history, itself acting as a work of literature that has seen many iterations.

Shakespeare’s play is full of allusions to the different iterations of the Troy legend; we see one of the most explicit forms of this towards the end of the play through the character of Ulysses. In the final scene of act four, Ulysses introduces the main character Troilus to Agamemnon. He dedicates twelve lines to the description of Troilus’ character before he reveals his name. Towards the end of this passage, he claims:

Thus says Aeneas; one that knows the youth

Even to his inches, and with private soul

Did in great Ilion thus translate him to me. (4.5.110-112)

When Aeneas first described Troilus to Ulysses, he was translating Troilus’ character into his own words, a translation which Ulysses is now translating into his own words for Agamemnon. Ulysses’ description becomes a translation of a translation, a metatextual moment that brings attention to the translated nature of the Troy story as a whole. Troilus acts as the representative of Troy through the metatextual lens, and Ulysses’ information about Troy comes from the one and only Aeneas, who is also the main source through which we as a society received the Trojan side of the story in Virgil’s emblematic epic poem The Aeneid. Through Ulysses’ description, Shakespeare emphasizes how this notion of representing historical truth is skewed, and that what he is presenting through this play is also colored by the many hues of the various iterations of this story.

In his article “The Banality of History in Troilus and Cressida” Andrew Griffin argues that Shakespeare’s play acts as a historiography in the humanist sense, bridging the gap between Troy and London not through an imagined genealogical inheritance, but through the connection and repetition of human experiences (Griffin 3). These experiences, however, seem silly and downright “pathetic” to Griffin, who criticizes the selfish natures of these so-called heroes whose “narcissism is hardly the stuff of epic glory” because their actions are rooted in their need for attention (Griffin 4). These tensions can be resolved if one were to analyze them through a metatheatrical lens.

Griffin was singling out Achilles in his critique of the selfishness of the characters found in this play, and it is Achilles to whom Ulysses is speaking when he says:

…no man is the lord of anything –

Though in and of him there be much consisting –

Till he communicate his parts to others;

Nor doth he of himself know them for aught

Till he behold them formed in th’ applause

Where they're extended; who, like an arch, reverb’rate

The voice again, or, like a gate of steel

Fronting the sun, receives and renders back

His figure and his heat. (3.3.115-123)

In this passage, Ulysses lands on a theory of performativity that this paper will examine going forward. He states that man is worthless until he communicates his self to others. Being lord of something means having ownership over it, and if no one truly owns something, then the next best thing is to perform the owning of it. It is when this performance is regarded that it can be considered “true.” This passage lands on performance as a reciprocal act, which requires an audience to witness and believe in it to give it legitimacy. Ulysses takes it a step further by stating that man needs to see his self in the form of the applause in order to comprehend his self. The metaphor of an arch reverberating a voice, and steel reflecting light from the sun, work in clearly explaining the dependent nature of this relationship. It is no longer just a matter of being seen and understood by a reciprocal party, but the performer needs their audience in order to exist on this plane of corporeality (relating to the body). With this notion of performativity in mind, the characters’ motivations being primarily based in their need for attention does not seem so unfounded. They feel to need to seek this attention because, without it, the reciprocal relationship on which their essence relies will remain unbalanced, thus removing these characters and this legend from the cultural consciousness. A few lines after this passage, Ulysses provides insight to what would happen if this relationship were put out of balance: “Nature, what things there are / Most abject in regard and dear in use! / What things again most dear in the esteem / And poor in worth” (3.3.127-130). Here, Ulysses illustrates how this can also work against those characters who fail to exude that same level of performativity. Those lesser known, such as Ajax in this instance, are either regarded well when they are poor in substance, or the other way around. This is a key tension within the reciprocal model of performativity; a good person could easily be misinterpreted and thought of in negative terms either because they do not perform their goodness or because their audience fails to understand them. Since interpretation is not as straight-forward as the reverberation of sound or the reflection of light, there is much more room for failure. Once these characters stop performing, the audience’s interest in them—thus, their worth—diminishes to nothing. A metatheatrical analysis helps put these characters’ apparent attention-seeking into the context of presenting this legend to the Elizabethan audiences. Shakespeare understood that legends like this one rely on the people that believe in them in order to survive, and exposed this reliance by making the well-known characters as unrecognizable as possible.

In his chapter titled “‘Lest We Remember ... Our Troy, Our Rome'” Jesús Tronch explores historical and individual memory in Troilus and Cressida. He argues that Shakespeare actively demythologizes (reinterprets so that it is free of mythical or heroic elements) the elements from Troy and Rome that England has glorified for so long as representative of its ancestor of mighty civilizations (Tronch 116). According to Tronch, Shakespeare does so by presenting these classical heroes as fractured individuals, a fracturing that occurs when these characters have to face their legacies and to deal with the ordeal of remembering and forgetting that is characteristic of the treatments of their stories. Through this analysis of memory, Tronch presents Ulysses’ speech about personified Time in terms of “the futility of heroic glory achieved only in the past” (Tronch 125). The distinction between actions done in the past versus the present is important because creating memory is an active process that needs constant fuel. This is a problem that Ulysses is articulating in regards to Achilles’ inaction, which, both in terms of the war and of the play (metatheater) is diminishing his impact on cultural memory.

Achilles asks the question “What, are my deeds forgot?” a question in response to which Ulysses begins his speech on Time and oblivion (3.3.144). In metatheatrical terms, the lines “Those scraps are good deeds past, which are devoured / As fast as they are made, forgot as soon / As done” help bring us into the context of the stage (3.3.148-150). The play is over after a set time, eventually the acting stops and the audience is no longer immersed in the story. Ulysses further explicates on this idea with the following section:

The present eye praises the present object.

Then marvel not, thou great and complete man,

That all the Greeks begin to worship Ajax,

Since things in motion sooner catch the eye

Than what not stirs. The cry went once on thee,

And still it might, and yet it may again,

If thou wouldst not entomb thyself alive

And case thy reputation in thy tent…(3.3.179-186)

According to Ulysses’ speech, you will be forgotten if you succumb to inaction because past deeds don’t matter. In this play, we as the audience have not seen Achilles’ good deeds; in fact, we have not seen any deeds from him on the stage. Within the physical realm of the stage, he is forgotten because Achilles’ main action so far in the play has been inaction due to his refusal to act. Ulysses is emphasizing that casing one’s reputation in a tent—a physical barrier between him and the audience—is bad because it will lead to oblivion. By including the theory of performativity, which relies on reciprocation from an audience, it becomes apparent that memory needs to be constructed in real time, or else it is all for naught. Ulysses heightens the threat of oblivion by juxtaposing Achilles’ inaction to Ajax’s action, the latter who is able to step into the spotlight that the former had left empty. Ulysses is telling him that the present audience of the play can only see what is on the stage, and to remain in their memory requires him to uphold a constant performance. We begin to see what happens when the reciprocal performance contract is broken, and it is Ulysses who highlights this tension and tries to inspire Achilles into performing once again.

In her chapter “‘Tricks We Play on the Dead’: Making History in Troilus and Cressida,” Heather James discusses how Shakespeare works to subvert the question of a singular national identity by bringing these fragmented characters of the Troy legend to the realm of corporeality via the stage, thus forcing modern audiences to confront their own fragmentary realities (James 117-118). James uses the word “palimpsest” when describing these characters, and it is an ample word to describe the treatment of the Troy legend as a whole (James 106). A palimpsest is a writing surface on which the original text has been erased to accommodate new text, a rewriting on top of previous work that still bleeds through. James showcases how Shakespeare portrays this story and these characters in all of their palimpsestic glories by combining these different retellings and presenting them as the fragments they are, thus not allowing for any one particular origin story to lay claim to them. This palimpsestic nature of these characters unquestionably informs their fragmented characterizations within the play. It is when these characters are then subjected to presenting themselves on the stage in front of an audience that these fragments are highlighted even further.

Due to Achilles’ blatant inaction throughout the play, Shakespeare gives Ulysses the task of presenting him in the third scene of act two, which is to say, Ulysses must conjure up Achilles’ character for the audiences to visualize while Achilles himself remains absent. In this scene, Ulysses states:

Imagined worth

Holds in his blood such swoll’n and hot discourse

That ’twixt his mental and his active parts

Kingdomed Achilles in commotion rages

And batters down himself. (2.3.170-174)

Achilles’ obsession with his own fame is nothing new, especially within the context of this paper; however, Ulysses’ choice words in this passage help illuminate the battle that is occurring between the stage and the story. The “imagined worth” stems from this long history of epic mythologizing that Heather James thoroughly examines in her book (2.3.170). The division between mental and active parts in line 172 implies that the mental faculty is an inactive one as opposed to the active physical one, an implication that further highlights the disparities laden within the reciprocal model of performativity. In order for these characters to uphold their legacies, they need to be active both in the war and on the stage. Ulysses identifies that this is a problem because there is no room for interiority within this model. There is a struggle between mental inaction and physical action that is trying to resolve itself via the stage, but it cannot. Throughout the play the only action we see happens in the final act, before which we get Ulysses making speeches about the need for performance without any actually occurring. Even though Achilles is singled out for his lack of performance, Shakespeare puts the rest of the characters in a state of inaction as well, albeit in different ways. The difference between these two types of inaction lies in their ability, or lack thereof, to continue performing for their audience. This highlights the disconnect between the tangible and visual now, and the memorial history of this legend. The play seems to be trying to bring into the corporeal realm of the stage a legend that has been through many iterations, thus relegating its origins to the realm of the “mental.” Shakespeare is actually bringing it into the liminal space between these two realms, the same space that Achilles stands “Kingdomed” and unable to reconcile the two (2.3.173). Through Ulysses, Shakespeare gives voice to his methods of demystifying these famous characters by exposing them to the demands of a performance-based world.

In his chapter “Shakespeare and the Siege of Troy,” Dieter Mehl engages with Shakespeare’s relationship to the Troy legend as a fuel for interpretation, resulting in a rendition that acts as a field for discussion and dialogue. Mehl states that Shakespeare uses Troy to represent a person’s, the public’s, and in fact the world’s relationship to the story, an aspect that helps illuminate the metatextual and metatheatrical elements of the play. Ulysses’ first major speech within the play identifies the problem these later quotes have been inversely building up to: “Degree being vizarded, / The unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask” (1.3.83-84). Degree refers to rank, distinction, or as Ulysses himself later describes, “the ladder of all high designs” (1.3.102). The previous quote is the first mention of degree in this speech, and Ulysses presents it in terms of a vizarding—masking—of degree, not yet of a removal. He later continues to include mention of taking it away and neglecting it, but not before this language of masking. Ulysses continues this sentiment by stating that this same mask can change the way people perceive someone, effectively acting as a manipulator of perspective. By equating the masking of degree to the masking of perception, Ulysses is making a bold claim about how this ladder of all high designs is nothing more than a performance itself. The preordained laws of hierarchy that work in defining worth are shown to be as prone to cultural perceptions as the characters on the stage. If it is this relationship between the performer and their audience that determines the worth of the performance, then it is abundantly clear that degree comes from and can only be upheld by the people that believe in it. When there is no longer the performance the audience expected, and memory cannot be actively made, the enterprise is not only sick but it is being completely destroyed. The mask is a tool of performativity that, when removed, reveals the fragile foundations underlying these manmade hierarchies.

When considering the theory of performativity that Ulysses introduces in Troilus and Cressida, a broader argument becomes apparent about the nature of manufactured institutions in the world and how much they depend on the belief of their people in order to remain in power. Within the context of both the play and the legendary war it depicts, Ulysses understands that these heroes need to constantly uphold a level of performance in order to remain acknowledged by history. We begin to detect cracks within this reciprocal performance relationship because it requires upholding a constant performance. The problem lies in the fact that this puts priority only on physical action and completely diminishes the importance of interiority; furthermore, this model also assumes a standardized method of interpretation, when in fact there is much more room for misinterpretation within this audience-performer relationship. The audience has just as much power over the performance as the performer does, because they are needed in order to give value to the performance in question. Trying to represent historical truth will always be influenced by the numerous altered versions of the story already in circulation. The need for constant performance in order to remain in the cultural consciousness explains the constant re-interpretations and translations of the Troy legend itself. Even to this day, the Troy legend and its heroes serve as inspiration for contemporary art, literature, and film. Shakespeare is challenging the cultural need to immortalize these heroes head-on by having these heroic characters embody the pressure this puts on them as representatives of this epic legend. Ulysses acts as a mouthpiece for Shakespeare in case the message fails to come through, and gives us a thorough analysis of the state of this story today, which depends on its public for the sake of its survival.