A “notable foundation of hearsay”: Creative Appropriations of Troy in Chaucer, Chapman, and Shakespeare

36 A “NOTABLE FOUNDATION OF HEARSAY”: CREATIVE APPROPRIATIONS OF TROY IN CHAUCER, CHAPMAN, AND SHAKESPEARE Sam Gilchrist Hall DOI: https://doi.org/10.14712/2571452X.2021.62.3 Abstract: An extended and precociously brilliant exercise in “parodic intertextuality,” Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (1602) mangles its two main sources, George Chapman’s translation of the Iliad and Chaucer’s courtly romance, Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1385). The play ruthlessly debunks rose-tinted representations of the Trojan war by dramatizing it as beset by gossip, venality and hypocrisy. It not only suggests that the fall of Troy was just the first awful misfortune in the endless series of atrocities that constitute history, but it also undermines the authority of Tudor histories that commonly held Britain was founded by a Trojan, Brut. Shakespeare thereby implies that the idea of a unitary British identity stretching back to the noble days of yore – a form of primordialism that has resurfaced in recent years – is built on nothing other than a “notable foundation of hearsay.” Keywords: Troilus and Cressida, Iliad, Shakespeare, Chaucer, rumour, history Fame is a form – perhaps the worst form – of incomprehension. Jorge Louis Borges.1 Set during the death throes of Trojan civilisation, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida dramatizes a mythological past beset by decidedly postmodern problems. The martial heroes of yore find themselves between a rock and a hard place – as perhaps most sentient beings are today. They may either act against their better 1 Jorge Louis Borges, Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999) 41. A “notable foundation of hearsay” 37 judgements, as Hector does when he fatefully ignores ill-omens, or indulge in a cynical disengagement from politics in the manner of Achilles, Patroclus and Thersites, who memorably dismisses the war with which Western Literature commences as nothing but lechery: “Lechery, lechery; still, wars and lechery; nothing / else holds fashion: a burning devil take them!” (Troilus and Cressida, V.ii.192-3)2 Primarily based on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and George Chapman’s translation of the Iliad, Shakespeare’s disenchanted retelling of this piece of Trojan apocrypha stages the transmission of corruption, cynicism and a precipitous sense of ennui through hearsay. One of the principal sources for Shakespeare’s English history plays, Samuel Daniel’s First Four Books of the Civil Wars (1595), displays the “selective amnesia”3 characteristic of historical writing in spades. Daniel moralises about the English victory at Agincourt: “Ungrateful times that impiously neglect / That worth that never again times shall show / O what eternall matter here is found! / Whence new immortal Illiads might proceed.”4 In Shakespeare’s telling, however, the young King’s achievements evaporate into ambiguity, while his Troilus and Cressida views the tall tale of Troy as matter in the sense employed in the play – that is, as pus pouring out of history’s “botchy core” (II.i.6). And it pays to remember that for a Tudor audience it is not only Western Literature that starts with Troy, but also British history – the Quarto edition of the play even bills it as the The Famous Historie of Troylus and Cresseid. Histories commonly included “the legendary account of Britain’s founding by the Trojan Brut” that had been “exploited by Henry VII to justify his claim to the throne (since he claimed descent from Brut) and by Henry VIII to justify his break with Rome (since with Brut as its founder England would be an imperium as ancient as Rome).”5 But the play puts paid to Daniel’s “primordialism,”6 showing all the talk of honour and duty to be a mere cover story for the worse excesses of human appetite, while the war’s events, Shakespeare implies, were motivated by 2 William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 1997). All references are to this edition and cite the act, scene and line numbers parenthetically. 3 Jonathan Baldo, Memory in Shakespeare’s Histories: Stages of Forgetting in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2012) 16. 4 Samuel Daniel, First Four Bookes of the Civil War, The Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 8 vols. (London: Routledge, 1957-1975) 3:421. 5 Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990) 21. 6 Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism (New York: Routledge, 1998) 144-68. Sam Gilchrist Hall 38 gossip, a fundamentally anti-social form of sociability. In this respect, then, this article considers Shakespeare as a reader, rather than a writer. I contend that his approach to the grand narratives of the past is devoutly critical, as subtly exposes the “incomprehension” that lies at the heart of prevalent understandings of the past. After all, while Chaucer’s deliberately dim-witted narrator is bowled over by compassion for the lovers – “Thise woful vers, that wepen as I wryte!” (I.7)7 – Shakespeare’s tone is one of fury both at seeing lives thwarted or destroyed by the personal agendas of impotent old men,8 not to mention forms of creativity that seek to exonerate or immortalise their petty caprices. Perhaps this is why Shakespeare amplifies the instrumental treatment of Cressida. Despite being a civilian, she is callously exchanged without a second thought. Yet, in Chaucer’s courtly romance, Hector rightly insists that since “she nys no prisonere” (IV.178), so it is illegal to “selle” (IV.182) her and only after protracted discussion and being cowed by fear of the besieged Trojan public’s response – “The noyse of peple up stirte thanne at ones, / As breme as blase of straw iset on-fire” (IV.183-84) – do the leaders reluctantly agree to the exchange. Shakespeare emphasises her tragic passivity, whereas Chaucer’s focus on the legalities of prisoner exchange implies that this “tragedie” would not have happened had the authorities had stuck to their own laws. It is primarily through the play’s pervasive use of gossip as a form of toxic sociability and sublimation of aggression that Shakespeare viciously debases this Gründmythos. And it is when his adaptation and omission from his sources is examined closely that this debasement can be most clearly perceived. Still, I believe that, like Genet, his obscenity is never obscene because it foregrounds the constitutive obscenity of foundational tales, which might well be understood as one of the several outrages – Cain and Abel, Chronos and Zeus, Romulus and Remus – with which cultures start. Indeed, Diomedes’ oxymoron that the Trojans are “pleased to breed out your inheritors” (IV.i.70) perceives Trojans as focusing on short-term gratification rather than the continuation of their civilisation. Fathoming the intricacies of Shakespeare’s transmission of Homer and Chaucer is 7 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F.N. Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957). Subsequent references are to this edition and cite the book and line numbers parenthetically. 8 “Menelaus is ingeniously shown to be a fool by Homer” by suggesting that Zeus will punish Paris for stealing his “Virginal wife.” Jessica Wolfe, “Chapman’s Ironic Homer,” College Literature 35, no. 4 (2008): 166. Elsewhere, he is described as a “soft spearman.” George Chapman and Richard Hooper, The Iliads of Homer […], 2 vols. (London: John Russell Smith, 1888) 17, 587. All references are to this edition and cite the book and line numbers parenthetically. A “notable foundation of hearsay” 39 also significant because the play’s intended audience, an elite coterie of lawyers, would have had a detailed understanding of the play’s key sources, not to mention an awareness of their nation’s (completely spurious) relationship to Troy. Bearing Margaret Rose’s concept of “parodic intertextuality,”9 in which a work’s implied readership is fully aware of the sustained allusion made by one text to others, in mind, this essay analyses the intertextual relationship of Ulysses’ speech about the importance of social hierarchy to its principal sources, before turning to the crucial significance of gossip in the play as a whole. Ultimately, Shakespeare’s gossipladen appropriation of Troy offers a complex critique of how creative interpretations of the past commonly denude their subjects – that is, the people enmeshed in history – of their vital particularity through the sort of moralisation and generalisation to which hearsay is prone. Debasing History: Homeric and Shakespearean Irony Instructed by the “goddess of estate” (Iliad 2, 132), Athene persuades Ulysses, who is neither retreating with the “rude multitude,” nor preventing their departure, to persuade the Greeks to continue the siege. She suggests they are all indebted to the nameless Greek dead, the forgotten “multitude” that “exceed” even Homer’s “song” and are commonly written out of history altogether. His speech persuading the generals to remain is partly motivated by revenge, which is the cause of the deaths in the first place, and partly by gossip. Long (and completely erroneously) thought to be Shakespeare’s statement of the Elizabethan World Picture or even his personal conservative credo, Ulysses’ famous speech about the necessity of “degree” must be seen in its dramatic context, in which it is a response to gossip about Achilles’ penchant for satirical pastiche over military action, a histrionic enthusiasm wholly absent from the sources: The great Achilles, whom opinion crowns The sinew and the forehead of our host, Having his ear full of his airy fame Grows dainty of his worth, and in his tent Lies mocking our designs. With him Patroclus Upon a lazy bed the livelong day Breaks scurrile jests; And with ridiculous and awkward action, 9 Margaret Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern and Post-modern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 17. Sam Gilchrist Hall 40 Which, slanderer, he imitation calls, He pageants us. (I.iii.142-51) The demi-god has grown complacent and is dining out on his former fame. As with all juicy gossip, Ulysses not only defers its main content – “He pageants us” – but in his adverbial phrase – “Upon a lazy bed” – he draws a subtle parallel between the “awkward action” of sodomy and that of parody, an analogy recurrently made in anti-theatrical polemics of Shakespeare’s day.10 The problem, he continues, with their cynical mockery is that it has led to an inhuman ambivalence: “Success or loss, what is or is not, serves / As stuff for these two to make paradoxes” (I.iii.183-84). Their actions display a perverse sense of superiority to those embroiled in historical events – for the most part against their wills and better natures. As that most colourful of humanists, Lodovico Settembrini, memorably inveighs: “Das Paradoxon ist die Giftblüte des Quietismus, das Schillern des faulig gewordenen Geists, die größte Liederlichkeit von allen!”11 Although I have elsewhere argued that Shakespeare’s “antithetical historical practice”12 in the Henriad (1595-99) might best be understood as an elaboration on the Cretan Liar paradox, Troilus and Cressida (1602) questions the value of paradox as means of conceiving the world, implying it can easily degenerate into sententious clichés of the sort Settembrini denounces. History’s numberless and nameless dead deserve better than “fond paradoxes to make fools in the ale house laugh” (Othello, II.i.140-41). Whereas Shakespearean history normally diversifies the number of viewpoints on any given historical situation – as with Williams in Henry V or the tavern scenes in Henry IV – in Ulysses’ famous speech, dialogue from the Iliad is repositioned and conflated into a monologue. Moreover, as Mihoko Suzuki astutely points out, “[t]he concept of ordered hierarchy that Ulysses so authoritatively adumbrates is borne out neither by the world of the play as Shakespeare represents it nor by Ulysses’ later actions.”13 Initially, the imagery of Ulysses’ conservativism picks up on Homer’s description of Nestor’s call to arms, 10 I elsewhere explore this in considerable detail; see Sam Gilchrist Hall, “In Mendacio Veritas: Telling the Truth through Lies in 1&2 Henry IV and Henry V,” Cahiers Élisabéthains 91, no. 1 (2016): 1-14. 11 “The paradox is the poisonous bloom of quietism; the bauble of an intellect that has become incurious, the greatest slovenliness of all.” Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2015) 308. The author’s translation. 12 Gilchrist Hall 3. 13 Mihoko Suzuki, “‘Truth Tired with Iteration’: Myth and Fiction in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida,” Philological Quarterly 66, no. 2 (1987): 165. A “notable foundation of hearsay” 41 following Atreus’ dream. Homer’s Nestor uses the example of “bees,” whose “Swarms [that] rise out of a hollow rock, repairing the degrees / Of their egression endlessly” (Iliad 2, 72-73). But Shakespeare’s Ulysses employs this metaphor to discredit Achilles and emphasise the need to continue fighting: “When that the general is not like the hive / To whom the foragers shall all repair, / What honey is expected?” (I.iii.80-83) Interestingly, this allegory is also found in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s trumped-up justification for going to war in the opening scene of Henry V. The religious leader draws from Erasmus’ pacifist tract Institutio principis christiani (1516),14 but completely inverts Erasmus’ message about the orderly society of the bees being a good example of how a Christian prince, such as Rabelais’s Pantagruel, should tend his own garden and not seek to expand his territory. Understanding the full extent of Shakespeare’s irony is contingent upon a close familiarity with Erasmus’ well-known manual. Shifting perspective from apian image to a cosmic one and following Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the universe, Ulysses continues: “the planets and this centre / Observe degree, priority and place” (I.iii.85-86). But while this could be said of the planets themselves, the same cannot be observed of the Gods from whom their names derive – Saturn, for instance, castrated and usurped his father and ate his own children, while his remaining son, Zeus, whom Homer himself characterises as the Godfather of a celestial mafia, had to administer an emetic to his father to get him to vomit up his half-digested siblings. Wilfully blind to the brute force behind any social hierarchy, Ulysses continues: “Take but degree away, untune that string / And hark what discord follows. / Each thing meets in mere oppugancy” (I.iii.109-11). In other words, inherited prerogative prevents chaos. Likewise, in Homer, Ulysses extolls the merits of autocracy: the rule is most irregular, where many rule One lord, one king, propose to thee; and he, To whom wise Saturn’s son, hath giv’n both law and empery To rule the public, is that king. (Iliad 2, 172-75) Leaving aside Zeus’ (and, for that matter, Saturn’s) own disregard for the “[p]rerogative of age” (I.iii.107) – not to mention, the manifest differences between how Homer characterises Zeus and how he is invoked – Shakespeare’s Ulysses amplifies this idea through negative exempla: 14 Andrew Gurr, “Henry V and the Bees’ Commonwealth,” Shakespeare Survey 30 (1977): 61-72. Sam Gilchrist Hall 42 Strength should be lord of imbecility, And the rude son should strike his father dead: Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong, Between whose endless jar justice lose their names, and so should justice too. Then everything includes itself in power, Power into will, will into appetite; And appetite, an universal wolf, So doubly seconded with will and power, Must make perforce an universal prey, And last eat up himself. (I.iii.114-24) Without proper social order, brute force will dictate judicial proceedings, rather than the jarring of opposing councils – an ironic assertion in a speech that itself conflates dialogue. He suggests that without “degree” the world will descend into a Hobbesian war of all against all, with each individual pursuing their rapacious and implacable appetites. The only possible outcome of this would be wholesale destruction both of society and humanity itself. While in Homer gustatory metaphors abound and are used for personification of the “insatiate field” or in connection with Gods – as when Ajax threatens Hector that the war will not be over “till Mars, by you, his rav’nous stomach fills” (Iliad 7, 56) – Shakespeare uses the idea of appetite to describe our will to power, which, unchecked, will not stop until it has destroyed everything including itself. Jessica Wolfe cogently examines George Chapman’s shifting relationship to Homer’s irony, identifying a pervasive interest in the “Irony of self-deception and consequent self-defeat,”15 especially in his dramatic works. Such is the irony apparent in Ulysses’ critique of appetite. Not only was the war itself motivated by carnal appetites, but also his reason for giving the speech is Achilles’ satire, a form of mimesis that reduces everything to its lowest common denominator – though often, in this case, with good reason. Homer’s Ulysses even beats the crippled plebeian truth-teller into submission with the symbol of the highest privilege, Agamemnon’s “sceptre” (Iliad 2, 156)16 characteristically using sheer “strength” to dominate “imbecility” or weakness. Still more disturbingly, in Shakespeare, it is Ulysses that orchestrates perhaps the closest thing to a gang rape on the Elizabethan stage: he suggests that the 15 Wolfe 163. 16 Skeptron (σκῆπτρον). A “notable foundation of hearsay” 43 defenceless Cressida be shared among the common soldiers and “kissed by the general.” Absent from the meeting of the generals in the Shakespearean version, a further irony is that it was originally Thersites that evokes the dangers of “appetite” in his castigation of Atrides: would’st thou yet again Force from some other lord his prise, to soothe the lusts that reign In thy encroaching appetite? It fits no prince to be A prince of ill, and govern us, or lead our progeny By rape to ruin. O base Greeks, deserving infamy, And ills eternal! (Iliad 2, 199-204) In the Iliad, Thersites attracts Ulysses’ ire because he points out the tendency that the powers that be have to perceive the status quo as the natural order of things, but he does not mention the self-destructive nature of “appetite.” David Hillman’s observation that “it is hard not to see all the idealizing talk in the play – about principles, reason, degree, honour, value and so on – as cover stories for something much less impressive; the condition of humanity here seems merely sordid and petty, as if the alternative to escaping from the human condition from above is escaping it from below,”17 is implicit in the play’s source, where the venality and hypocrisy of the generals is quite manifest. Far from affirming moral values like the indissoluble tie of matrimony, the war is simply a shameful instance of a sovereign pursuing his own desires and a politically expedient cover for the generals to fulfil their own unbridled appetites, as Homer’s Thersites reminds Aurides: “Thy tents are full of brass; and dames, the choice of all, are thine” (Iliad 2, 195). Gossip and the Weight of Futurity While 2 Henry IV opens with the theatrical embodiment of dishonesty, Rumour, honestly disclosing her intension to spread misinformation, Troilus and Cressida is constituted by gossip. Achilles lazes about because he is confident in his reputation; the affair between Troilus and Cressida happens because of Pandarus’ verbal machinations; Ulysses manipulates Achilles into action by hearsay: “these Grecian lords […] even already / They clap the lubber Ajax on the shoulder, / As 17 David Hillman, “The Worst Case of Knowing the Other? Stanley Cavell and Troilus and Cressida,” Philosophy and Literature 32, no. 1 (2008): 77. Sam Gilchrist Hall 44 if his foot were on brave Hector’s breast” (III.iii.143-45). And while, in Chaucer, Troilus fears that Cressid will be seduced by her father’s report of the Greek gallants or simply raped – “He shal som Greke so preyse and wel alose, / That ravysshen he shal yow with his speche, / Or do yow don by force as he shal teche” (IV.1473-75) – in Shakespeare, it is Troilus himself who betrays feelings of inadequacy in comparison to what he has heard about the Greeks: “I cannot sing, / Nor heel the high lavolt […] fair virtues all, / To which the Grecians are most prompt and pregnant” (IV.v.92-94) – not that she has asked him to do any of these things. The play displays a peculiar awareness about future gossip. Even as Troilus and Cressida promise themselves to one another, they seem to comprehend the generalisations latent in their personal misfortunes. Foreshadowing their literary afterlives, Pandarus provides a coda to their exchange of vows, commenting: “let all pitiful goers-between be called to the world’s end after my name; call them all Pandars; let all constant men be Troiluses, all false women Cressids” (III.ii.199203). Aware of her double bind, when Diomedes questions her about the love token of a sleeve that Troilus gave her, she reflects in an aside displaying tragic foreknowledge: “’Twas one’s that loved me better than you will” (V.ii.90). In stark contrast, Chaucer’s Criseyde speaks of a “future tyme […] / Koude I nat seen” (V.748-49) and many of Chaucer’s characters recurrently cite ancient auctouree to bolster their arguments – anachronistically, of course, as these authorities would postdate Troy – while his narrator recurrently emphasises his debt to his sources. His narrator refuses to “chide” this “sely womman” (V.1093) because “she was so sory for hir untrouthe” (V.1098) and, crucially, because “[h]ire name, allas! Is punysshed so wyde” (V.1095). In short, then, the weight of futurity weighs heavily on Shakespeare’s protagonists, whereas it is doing justice to the past that concerns Chaucer. Hearsay actually constitutes what Hillman identifies as the play’s “drive to generalization; a displacement from particular circumstances and situations to universals – a shift from the ordinary to the metaphysical.”18 It denudes the present of any vitality, frustrates individual agency and breeds a complacent cynicism of the sort already mentioned. Such is Helen’s shocking lassitude that Pandarus and Cressida initially chatter about: “Hector was gone, but Helen was not up” (I.ii.54). That is, she cannot even be bothered to get out of bed to see a war being waged on her behalf, whereas she actively encourages Hector’s participation in the original: “Hector, by Helenus’ advice, doth seek / Advent’rous combat on the boldest Greek” (Iliad 7,1-2). 18 Hillman 77. A “notable foundation of hearsay” 51 burnout in the most literal sense in The Anatomy of Melancholy, when he writes of “a vast Chaos and confusion of books, we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning. For my part I am one of the number.”28 Chaucer’s tale concludes with a beautiful Boethian contemptus mundi. The narrator suggests that Greece and Troy, Helen and Menelaus, Troilus and Cressid and all “worldly contrarieties may be transcended by Christian theology,”29 emphasising the essentially transitory nature of desire and beauty alike: “This worlde […] passeth soone as floures faire” (V.1841). Shakespeare, in contrast, displays scepticism, if not downright cynicism, about creativity; as Troilus and Cressida makes clear, art has had a hand in aestheticizing outrages since its inception. Yet, it is through creative engagement with the past alone that the spell cast by its stories can be disenchanted. In this regard, Hillman’s assessment of it as “Shakespeare’s most self-consciously philosophical play”30 is not too far off the mark. However, the play’s beguiling philosophical power lies not in the rarefied language of the monologues on the “theme of honour and renown” (II.ii.198), which Hector’s mugging of a Greek for his glitzy armour and Achilles’ ambush and murder of him expose as nothing but cynical posturing. Rather, Swinburne’s famous observation that the play is a “[…] hydra-headed prodigy, [which] at once defies and derides definitive comment”31 should be read as a statement of Troilus and Cressida’s philosophical procedure: it exposes the “incomprehension” at the heart of creative appropriations of famous events, thereby frustrating the construction of individual and collective identity based on external qualities. As an extended exercise in “parodic intertextuality,”32 the play certainly “defies and derides” glorification of an outrage at the root of literary history. Far from being founded on the noble days of yore, the myth of a unitary British identity is built on what Philip Sidney bases historians’ authority: nothing other than a “notable foundation of hearsay.”33 28 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York: New York Review Books, 2001) 24. 29 Molly Murray, “The Value of ‘Eschaunge’: Ransom and Substitution in Troilus and Criseyde,” ELH 69, no. 2 (2002): 335. 30 Hillman 24. 31 Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Study of Shakespeare (London: Chatto and Windus, 1880) 200. 32 Rose 17. 33 Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, or The Defence of Poesy, revised and expanded for the 3rd edition by R.W. Maslen (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001) 89. Sam Gilchrist Hall 52 BIBLIOGRAPHY Baldo, Jonathan. Memory in Shakespeare’s Histories: Stages of Forgetting in Early Modern England. London: Routledge, 2012. Borges, Jorge Louis. Fictions. Translated by Andrew Hurley. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999. Botelho, Keith. 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