The Banality of History in Troilus and Cressida
Griffin, Andrew. “The Banality of History in Troilus and Cressida". Early Modern Literary Studies 12.2 (September, 2006) 4.1-12 <URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/12-2/grifbana.htm>.
These ancient representments of times past
Tell us that men have, do, and always run
The self same line of action, and do cast
Their course alike, and nothing can be done
Whilst they, their ends, and nature are the same
— Samuel Daniel.
History repeats the old conceits,
The glib replies, the same defeats.
One finds almost the same or similar proverbs, though in different words, in every country, and the reason is that proverbs are born of experience or observation of things which are everywhere alike.
Troilus: This is the monstruosity in love, lady: that the will is infinite and the execution confined: that the desire is boundless, and the act a slave to limit.While Harold Bloom finds these observations “extraordinary” and “mordant” and while he argues that Troilus acts here as a “metaphysician of love, or . . . lust,” these lines seem to be “metaphysically” astute only in their ability to diagnose that which is generic and common to the species. As such a passionate proponent of what is often called “Shakespearean universality,” it’s not surprising that Bloom would latch onto and celebrate these dull truisms; as an attentive reader of Shakespeare, it is surprising that he’d ignore Cressida’s powerfully deflating “They say.” Both Bloom and Troilus are caught-up in the hyperbolically mystifying rhetoric of desire—“the monstruosity of love,” unbearable slavery, “boundless” yearnings—but Cressida recognizes the banality of these truisms by anchoring them in the faceless body of a proverbial “They.” “They” say such things because “They” see such things every day, and “They” say such things because such sense is so common that it can’t be anchored to a single body, a single voice, a single brilliantly insightful mind.
Cressida: They say all lovers swear more performance than they are able and yet reserve an ability that they never perform: vowing more than the perfection of ten, and discharging less than the tenth part of one.
surfaces occasionally in overt form, such as Hector’s anachronistic reference, in 2.2., to Aristotle’s Ethics, a work that won’t be written until long after Hector is dead, buried, and converted into legend. But unlike other plays in which historical figures make ‘unwitting’ references to their own historicity (a strategy of irony that privileges the audience’s metadramatic position), this play afflicts the characters with a historical ‘knowledge’ that contaminates most, if not all, of their verbal intercourse.But while Charnes here puts scare-quotes around the “previous” of “‘previous’ existences” to indicate the characters’ awareness of their bizarrely predetermining historico-literary legacies—the sense that they’re running after the idealized image that they have “already” become in the future— perhaps these quotations should work to contain “previous” because the logic of priority and causality doesn’t seem to fit with the problematic temporality of historical timelessness that characterizes the play’s thinking of history. The repeated anachronistic references to God and the devil—so common in Shakespeare’s plays that deal with pre-Christian cultures—may be “mere” oversights or uncritically deployed habits of poetic convention, but it’s difficult not to be struck when Pandarus, Troilus and Cressida recite a chorus of “Amens”:
Pandarus: Say ‘Amen.’
...men have, do, and always runFollowing from this frightening historical logic according to which “nothing can be done,” Daniel draws more explicit conclusions about the historiographical project on the first page of his Collections of the History of England: we don’t need to know, he claims, all that’s happened in the past, “For had we the particular occurrents of all ages, and all nations, it might more stuffe, but not better our vnderstanding. We shall finde still the same correspondencies to hold in the actions of men: Vertues, and Vices the same . . . the causes of the ruines, and mutations of States to be alike.”
The self same line of action, and do cast
Their course alike, and nothing can be done
Whilst they, their ends, and nature are the same.
Good traders in the flesh, set this in your painted cloths.Thanks to Pandarus’ speech here, it seems that historiographers no longer need to work to establish a mythic past for London, because that mythic past falls easily from the stage into the eager laps of Pandarus’ “Brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade.” A mythic past, certainly, but it’s not London proper that inherits a Trojan legacy or embodies its cultural energy: the prostitutes, panders and V.D. ridden bodies imagined to roam the streets and theatres of Southwark—outside the walls of Troynovant—are the true inheritors of a Trojan lineage. While King James may no longer wish to find himself reflected in the Trojan myth, it seems that Pandarus has already insinuated himself quite easily into the historically specific guild system of early modern London as he imagines himself part of a panders’ “hall.” Perhaps at his guild-meetings he encounters an apprenticing version of Middleton’s Allwit from A Chaste Maid in Cheapside? Perhaps Pandarus, walking through London, recognizes the vital energy of Thersites lurking in the soul Jonson’s Downright, a perpetually irritated soldier who has recently returned from a war on the continent? This move from Troilus and Cressida to Middleton and Jonson is, I think, apt, because Pandarus seems to imagine that Troy is the city that their city comedies will soon begin to stage and because these comedies—preoccupied with bawdy self-indulgence and appetite—seem to inherit the Trojan essence that Pandarus so eagerly bequeaths. Epic inheritance becomes here a strangely congenital STD. But despite the rhetoric of genealogy, inheritance and lineage that Pandarus invokes, the play seems to be reminding us in its unsettlingly determinist vision of history that that the audience doesn’t need to wait for Pandarus’ tragic, impending death before it lays claim to his pathological property (or properties). Southwark has already inherited its disease because the disease that Pandarus bequeaths is a vulgar human nature that chronically articulates itself, again and again and again, as a historical record populated by bawds, narcissists and venal heroes. As my epigraph from Elvis Costello suggests, the repetition of history isn’t the epic repetition of toppled cities and glorious battles: it’s the perpetual return of glib replies and the same small, erotic defeats. Perhaps the generic designation of Troilus and Cressida has been the object of so much disagreement because this truth of history seems tragic even though it takes the shape of comic rebirth, or because this comic truth is too easily captured in the grating and terrifying universality of truisms. “A man is a man.” Tilley M243.
As man as be here of Pandar’s hall,
Your eyes, half out, weep out at Pandar’s fall;
Or if you cannot weep, yet give some groands,
Though not for me, yet for your aching bones.
Brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade,
Some two months hence my will shall here be made.
It should be now, but that my fear is this,
Some gallèd goose of Winchester would hiss.
Till then I’ll sweat and seek about for eases,
And at that time bequeath you my diseases.
 Samuel Daniel, “The Tragedy of Philotas,” in The Whole Workes of Samvel Daniel Esquire in Poetrie (London: Nicholas Okes, 1623), 183.
 Elvis Costello, “Beyond Belief,” from Imperial Bedroom (Rhino/WEA, 1982).
 Francesco Guicciardini, “Ricordi,” in Selected Writings, ed. Cecil Grayson, trans. Margaret Grayson (Toronto: Oxford U P, 1965), 8.
 William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, ed. Kenneth Muir (New York: Oxford U P, 1982), 3.2.72-82.
 Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverside Books, 1998), 337.
 Arthur Tilley, ed., A Dictionary of Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 1950), P83.
 Tilley, A Dictionary, W828.
 Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.32-3; Tilley, A Dictionary, C715.
 Tilley, A Dictionary, S174; Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.33-4.
 Tilley, A Dictionary, M922; Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.115.
 Tilley, A Dictionary, F40; Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 3.1.96.
 Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 3.2.89-90; Tilley, A Dictionary, W828.
 Cf. Matthew Greenfield, “Fragments of Nationalism in Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Quarterly 51.2 (2000): 187; Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy (New York: Cambridge U P, 1997), 29, 32, 89, passim; Douglas Cole, “Myth and Anti-Myth: The Case of Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Quarterly 31.1 (1980): 79; David Hillman, “The Gastric Epic: Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Quarterly 48.3 (1997): 296.
 From Hayden White, Metahistory: “putative laws (such as ‘Bad money drives out good,’ or even such banal observations as ‘What goes up must come down’) are usually at least tacitly invoked during the course of the historian’s efforts to explain such a phenomenon as, say, the Great Depression or the Fall of the Roman Empire. The commonsensical or conventional nature of these latter generalizations does not affect their status as the presumed major premises of nomological-deductive arguments by which explanations of events given in the story are provided. The nature of the generalizations only points to the protoscientific character of historical explanation in general, or the inadequacy of the social sciences from which such generalizations, appearing at an appropriately modified and more rigorously stated form, might be borrowed” (11-12).
 Cf. Arthur B. Ferguson, Clio Unbound: Perception of the social and cultural past in renaissance England (Durham: Duke U P, 1979). For Ferguson, early modern historians and antiquaries were still far from recognizing the relativizing force of historicity and the potent claims of “social history” on the record of political change, but members of the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries in the mid-1580s were also coming to relate differently to historical records and were recognizing the significance of more “social” documents (i.e. legal records, Roman coins, Ecclesiastical documents) that prior historians had simply ignored.
 Cf. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. P. C. Bayley (New York: Oxford U P, 1965), 3.9.45-6, 4.11.27-8.
 René Girard, “The Politics of Desire in Troilus and Cressida,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Routledge, 1985), 192. Heather James makes a valuable, qualifying point: in his challenge to the epic grandeur of the characters that he stages, Shakespeare isn’t wholly innovative. James recognizes—as did Caxton and Lydgate and Ariosto—that these epic heroes were treated ambivalently even in The Aeneid and The Iliad. It’s important to recognize, however, that while Virgil and Homer treat these characters ambivalently, their subsequent literary and historiographical appropriations had, as Rosemarie Colie argues, generally flattened the characters and reduced them to emblematic tokens of single traits: “noble Hector,” “strong Achilles,” “wronged Troilus.”
 Cole, “Myth and Anti-Myth: The Case of Troilus and Cressida,” 78.
 Hillman, “The Gastric Epic: Troilus and Cressida,” passim.
 James, Shakespeare’s Troy, 32. Other critics who make similar observations include Linda Charnes, Una Ellis-Fermor and Harry Berger Jr. For Charnes, the characters in Troilus and Cressida often seem self-consciously aware of their impending textualizations, and this jarring between their self-experience and the experience of their looming textual identities draws attention to the fabricated quality of all mythic stories. Ellis-Fermor argues that, in the play, “chaos . . . [is] the ultimate fact of being” (72). Berger, following Coleridge, makes an interesting and similar point when he claims that the staging of mythic history disrupts any sense of mythic grandeur: the obvious and literal embodiment of mythic characters by actors (the move from rhetorical to mimetic representation) necessarily demystifies them.
 Paying close attention to Bacon as a theorist of history and historiography, Arthur B. Ferguson offers a meticulous account of the rise, methods, habits and assumptions of humanist historicism in Clio Unbound (see esp. pp. 37-50). Cf. F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought, passim; D. R. Woolf, “The Historian as Counsellor,” in The Idea of History in Early Stuart England (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1990), 141-58.
 Sidney’s famous criticism of historians in The Defense of Poetry is a perfect example of this imagined relationship between historiography and moral philosophy. For Sidney, historians are poor teachers—even though teaching is their goal—because they are “tied . . . not to what should be but to what is” (32): they can’t readily show, that is, the rewarding of virtue because their only examples are found in a problematically unjust historical record.
 In Shakespeare’s Humanism, Robin Headlam Wells makes a claim similar to Ferguson’s: “If the past had a message for the modern world, that was because human nature if fundamentally the same in all ages” (136).
 Sir Philip Sidney, A Defense of Poetry, ed. J. A. Van Dorsten (New York: Oxford U P, 1966), 30.
 Of course it’s wrongheaded to suggest that we’ve since moved beyond this naïve vision of historical knowledge. For a contemporary rehashing of this humanist understanding of historical universality and literary value, see Peter Berkowitz’s recent review of Theory’s Empire, “Literature in Theory,” in Policy Review 135 (2006), [journal on-line]; available from www.policyreview.org/135/berkowitz.html (accessed 22 August 2006).
 Ferguson, Clio Unbound, 59.
 For an example of this ambivalence toward certain historico-allegorical readings of the play, see Tony Dawson’s review of Eric S. Mallin’s Inscribing the Time, in Early Modern Literary Studies 2.1 (1996), [journal on-line]; available from http://purl.oclc.org/emls/02-1/rev_daw1.html (accessed 22 August 2006).
 Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.74-5.
 Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.77
 Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.100, 102.
 Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.108, 109.
 Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.115-7.
 Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.124-5.
 Cf. Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.317-20.
 Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.347-8.
 Girard, “The Politics of Desire in Troilus and Cressida,” 207.
 This deflation of history to the story of individual pathology remains a current if marginalized practice. Menno Meyjes’ 2002 film Max recounts the rise of National Socialism in intra-war Germany and the relationship between a young Hitler and an art-dealer, Max Rothman. Struggling to find a market for his realist, classically informed sketches, Hitler meets up with Rothman who trades mostly in the pre-surrealist paintings of Grosz and Ernst. While making gestures to the social space from which National Socialism might causally emerge in 1920s Germany (rampant unemployment, a nationally humiliating war-guilt clause (Article 231) in the Treaty of Versaille, an established tradition of anti-semitism, etc.), the film privileges a sense that National Socialism emerges primarily from the mind of a pathologically insecure Hitler who has a difficult time coping with war trauma, coming to terms with his inner-demons, dealing with women, and making any friends outside a burgeoning community of politicised anti-semites. Though intentionally glib and reductive, Rothman’s recognition that Hitler had “had a bad war” seems to speak to the truth of history as imagined in Meyjes’ film. Hitler’s own “bad war” is primarily and causally central to our understanding of history and the Second World War. It seems as if the film takes seriously Meyjes’ Hitler’s striking and frightening observation (borrowed from Benjamin?) that “politics is the new art,” and that this new aestheticized politics is best understood by plumbing the souls of its artists.
 Perhaps “a-chrony”—the absence of time—would be a more adequate term because it avoids the temporal differentiation of “before” and “after” on which “anachrony” relies. It’s this sense of “a-chrony” that I aim to invoke here by “anachrony.”
 Linda Charnes, Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U P, 1993), 76.
 For a valuable reading of the historical specificity of subjectively experienced historical belatedness—an act of “anticipatory retrospection”— see Marshall Grossman’s reading of St. George/Redcrosse in The Story of All Things, esp. pp. 41-3. See also Jonathan Goldberg’s well-historicized discussion of the experience of subjective belatedness in “Shakespearean Characters: The Generation of Silvia” and “Shakespearean Inscriptions: The Voicing of Power” (both reprinted in Shakespeare’s Hand).
 Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 3.2.194-7.
 Naseeb Shaheen, “Biblical Echoes in Troilus and Cressida,” Notes and Queries 241.2 / 43.2 (1996): 192-3.
 Ferguson, Clio Unbound, 76.
 Daniel, “The Tragedy of Philotas,” 183.
 While many critics argue that Troilus and Cressida was written to be performed as an Inns of Court revel, and while the quarto’s note to the “Eternal reader” (!) suggests that it was never performed at all, Pandarus’ speech here seems to suggest that the play was, in fact, written for performance at a public theatre. Though the speech seems too bawdy and scathing for the public stage (Muir 8), would Pandarus be able to address his “Brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade” at an Inns of Court revel? If the speech is effective because it speaks to the imagined presence of prostitutes and bawds in the audience, doesn’t their imagined presence suggest the type of audience one might find in the pit at a public theatre in Southwark? Bloom makes a similar but less tentative argument that Troilus and Cressida was written and performed at the Globe; see Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 327.
 Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 5.10.45-55.
 An early version of this paper was presented in “Shakespeare and the Invention of the Quasi-Human,” a workshop at the 2006 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America. I would like to thank participants of that seminar for their valuable feedback, especially Margaret Owens, Aaron Kunin, Unhae Langis, Doug Eskew, and Lara Bovilsky. This paper was also improved by valuable feedback from Helen Ostovich.