Philosophy and Literature

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David Hillman

The Worst Case of Knowing the Other?

Stanley Cavell and Troilus and Cressida

Stanley Cavell’s luminous and influential writings about Shakespeare’s works include extended essays on seven of the plays, and, scattered throughout his writings, more casual passages on many of the others. He takes these works to be significantly engaged in the conditions of skepticism as he apprehends it. These plays, according to Cavell, wrestle profoundly with questions about the origins of, and the possibilities of living with, sceptical ways of thinking.

Troilus and Cressida is Shakespeare’s most self-consciously philosophical play, and the place in the Shakespearean corpus where the relations between philosophy and literature are most openly and directly addressed. It is often referred to as a “skeptical satire,” and considered to be a kind of prelude to the great tragedies of the first decade in the seventeenth century. As I intend to show, in practically all of its salient features the play exhibits precise and—to my mind—unmistakable versions of many of the most significant features of skepticism as illuminated by the work of Cavell.

Heinrich Heine, rather astonishingly, declared that Troilus and Cressida was “Shakespeare’s most characteristic creation”; “for a detailed judgement,” he added, “we should need the help of that new aesthetics which has not yet been written.”1 I suggest that Cavell’s aesthetics might go some way to remedying the absence Heine identifies. To my knowledge, though, there is not a single reference to the play—and certainly no extended discussion—throughout the writings of Cavell, and this strikes me as something of a mystery; for Troilus and Cressida appears to present opportunities to exemplify with particular clarity the lineaments of skepticism Cavell finds elsewhere writ large in the Shakespearean corpus. And I think the play also offers possibilities for extending these investigations in unexplored directions, perhaps towards the origins of Shakespeare’s engrossment with skeptical problems, perhaps towards the delicate question of the borderline between skepticism and cynicism, or the relation between, say, Montaignean skepticism (which Cavell describes as asking “how to conduct oneself best in an uncertain world”) and Cartesian skepticism (“how to live at all in a groundless world”)2—questions I intend to open rather than trying to answer here. In a word, if one is going to write about the claims of reason in Shakespeare, overlooking the play where the word “reason” appears significantly more often than in any other play (21 times according to the Harvard Shakespeare Concordance) seems like a peculiar thing to do. It is of course possible that the play has simply, as it were, not found an opportunity to impress itself upon the attention of Cavell, more or less by happenstance; if so, one aim of this paper is, quite simply, to remedy that oversight. More impertinently, but also more interestingly—and, perhaps, in a more Cavellian manner—I will be prompted to contemplate towards the end of this paper the possibility that there may perhaps be some knowledge being disowned in the occlusion of this play from Cavell’s writing.

I begin, by way of prologue, with a short rumination about my title, which, has had a tendency to oscillate in my mind between “the worst case of the other” and “the worst case of knowing the other”; this uncertainty has something to do with, precisely, the question of the relation between cynicism and the attempt to deny skepticism—that is, between assuming the worst about another, and assuming one knows anything at all about the other—as if to say, if that’s (epistemologically) the worst I can do, well, at least I know something, however unsavory or reductive it may be; perhaps the play’s best-known phrase, “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin” (3.3.175), reveals just how disturbing its vision is.3 For the phrase has often been taken out of context and made to mean something rather idealizing, as if it refers to the natural affinity or humanity of us all; its actual meaning, made clear by the following line (“That all with one consent praise new-born gauds”), is far more cynical.

The tone of many of the play’s lines is indeed hard to pin down, as, more generally, is the question of its genre. One fairly obvious explanation for what I am calling, quite tendentiously, an occlusion from Cavell’s writings can be found in this area, for Troilus and Cressida cannot claim true membership in any of the generic schemes with which Cavell has worked. It bears neither the holiday in its eye nor the gravity in its ear to qualify for any of Cavell’s more or less formal categorizations. It is not (quite) a tragedy (though it is designated as such in the First Folio, and contains several gestures in the direction of tragedy), nor can one even call it a failed tragedy (this is how Cavell describes Coriolanus—DK, p. 162); I would say that the play’s skepticism is so corrosive that it is not even death-dealing (though it is true that Hector is killed, his is “a fruitless death” (DK, p. 161)—and anyway, he can hardly be construed as a tragic hero). The play is, though funny, not (quite) a comedy—let alone a comedy of remarriage. If anything, it seems closer to a defamation of marriage; the drive throughout—from the beginning of the story in Paris’ abduction of Helen, to its end, with Hector’s disdainful dismissal of Andromache—is resolutely against marriage; this is not a matter of “for better, for worse”—it is, plainly and unmistakably, for worse. It is (hardly) a melodrama, though its heroine undoubtedly has significant features in common with the unknown women Cavell finds populating this form (and Cressida’s search for “the right to tell her story”4 is openly thematized here). There seems to be no love lost in this play, no love to be either avoided or recovered.

“There is none of Shakespeare’s plays harder to characterize,” was Coleridge’s verdict on Troilus and Cressida (NCS, p. 5). The play works through a blurring of boundaries of all kinds—between these different genres, between the different factions in the play, between the human and the sub-human, between “the bold and coward, / The wise and fool, the artist and unread, / The hard and soft” (1.3.23–25). (Compare Richard Wheeler’s rephrasing of Cavell’s understanding of Shakespearean tragedy: it “does not do its work by blurring boundaries—whether those that separate one individual from another, life from art, the human from the sacred, or illusion from reality—but by making the fact of the characters’ separate existence, and more, present to me.”5) In particular, the play lacks either the kind of potential community, founded upon the sharing of ordinary language, towards which comedy pushes, or the kind of isolated, fully imagined protagonist who takes upon him- or herself the burden of tragedy. Indeed, the play can be described through exactly the absence of either of these possibilities. Both Greek and Trojan groupings are radically fragmented—“each thing meets / In mere oppugnancy” (1.3.110–11): there are camps, and “hollow factions” (1.3.80) within these camps, but there is no sense of real community. The possibility of community is destroyed partly, I think, through the play’s unusual language, which is for the most part obscure, abstract and syntactically difficult, eschewing the ordinary in favour of the extraordinary, the bombastic and the abstruse—a “repudiation of assured significance” (DK, p. 19)—of the way language represents the world; if skepticism manifests what Cavell calls a “wish to transgress the naturalness of human speech,”6 Troilus and Cressida’s unnatural language—its linguistic hyper-competence—undermines our ordinary connections to the characters and events it depicts; it deliberately “sets obstacles in our way” (NCS, pp. 22–26), making it very difficult for the audience to share this world. Line 2 of the play’s prologue: “The princes orgulous, their high blood chafed”; “orgulous” is a peculiar way to make contact with and engage the attention of one’s audience at the opening of a play (and note, by the way, the connection between these princes’ pride and the chafing of their blood: between, say, inflated aspirations and raised blood pressure). The language here mimics the content—it can itself aptly be described as “orgulous.”

The idealism of the characters’ language may be taken to figure what Cavell might call a failure of moral understanding. A vast gap is opened up between the heightened philosophical discourse and the more likely motivations of the characters, as well as between the abstract concepts and the constant underlying substratum of degrading references to the insatiable and diseased body.7 The end-product of the over-insistence on reason or value is unrestrained passion or madness; the inflation of the language is countered by a radical deflation. Alongside this, there is throughout the play a drive to generalization; a displacement from particular circumstances and situations to universals—a shift from the ordinary to the metaphysical; as Anthony Dawson puts it in his introduction to his recent edition of Troilus and Cressida, “the urge to generalize hollows out the present moment” (NCS, p. 24).8 In this sense, the play can be said to depict something like the transposition Cavell discerns at the root of skepticism—a repudiation of presence in favor of cogitation, or “the attempt to convert the human condition, the condition of humanity, into an intellectual difficulty” (DK, p. 138). Except that here, the original problem doesn’t seem to merit the grand label of “the condition of humanity”: it is hard not to see all the idealizing talk in the play—about principles, reason, degree, honor, 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. It is as if in this instance or at this point Shakespeare could not find a path back from the metaphysical to the everyday, from moral concepts to contemplative modes of thought; as if the only way he could find to climb down from the high-flown rhetoric was a very long way down, into the realms of scurvy invective, rubbing our noses in the “Most putrefied core” (5.8.1) of all ideals. Instead of a healing or return to ordinary language—a Wittgensteinian returning of language to its home—Shakespeare gives us here an extra-ordinary language which is both exiled and debased—“Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart” (5.3.107).

The language of the play is filled not only with generalizations but also with personified abstractions; concomitantly, the characters all seem to be severely flattened out, almost reified. The repudiation of the particular in this play goes hand in hand with something like a negation of subjectivity as such. Shakespeare here quite uncharacteristically “decharacterizes” his legendary protagonists, who become little more than “ciphers” in the “great accompt” (Henry V, Prologue, 17) of the Trojan legend. The play’s “dependence on a prodigious literary and rhetorical legacy” makes it inevitable that it should become, as Cavell puts it in an early essay on ordinary language philosophy, “entangled in the practical problem of the freedom of the will.”9 The issue of free will for a dramatic character is, I think, an ever-present one in Cavell’s Shakespeare; but perhaps never with quite this recalcitrance. We might ask: did Shakespeare find himself, in coming to this overdetermined material, unable to find a satisfactory answer to the perennial Cavellian questions: “What permits me to speak in the name of these others?”10—who has the right to relate these stories? how can I make these stories, these words, mine? Is there any scope for change here? The characters are all massively pre-scripted; they have become public property—public, we could say, before they have had a chance to be private. They cannot, so to speak, take their lives into their own hands; to use the play’s own word, they are “prenominate[d]” (4.5.250)—their very names allow them no room for maneuver, as they themselves seem to know (even some of the relatively minor characters seem to be in the grip of their own names; note the jokes about a jakes (a toilet) in relation to Ajax, and the fact that Antenor (an-tenor) is completely silent throughout the play—see SE, pp. 78–79). It is all given a priori. The play’s insistence on the sovereignty of the past emerges not just in its sense of an absolute lack of freedom of will but also in its pattern of reverting to etymology as unavoidably shaping the use of words. With this in mind, one could perhaps imagine the neologisms strewn throughout the text as a kind of counterphobic measure, as if Shakespeare was desperately trying to resist a sense of constraint by the past through the expedient of furiously coining new words.

For it seems to me entirely possible that, in this foreclosure of freedom, Shakespeare may have felt a certain kinship with his protagonists. What I am suggesting here is that, perhaps more sharply than at any other point in his career as playwright, in coming to write this play Shakespeare may have faced what Cavell refers to as “a fantasy, or fear [. . .] of inexpressiveness”—the fantasy that “what I express is beyond my control,” or the fear that he might be powerless—to change anything in his story, to make these characters known.11 The play’s characters are all noticeably opaque (to each other as well as to us). It is almost as if, in coming to this extraordinarily well-rehearsed and reiterated material—far and away the most popular and widely circulated traditional story of the Elizabethan age12—Shakespeare found himself for once “irretrievably outside” these characters—the position in which the skeptic places himself in relation to the other. (We might even speculate that he chose this material precisely as an objectification of the sense of his outsideness—his skepticism.) If I am right about this, and in so far as Troilus and Cressida can be viewed as a prelude to the tragedies, it is a marker of Shakespeare’s greatness that he was not only able to make superb theatre of the position he faced here, but that he was then able to move beyond it and diagnose it as tragedy.

There is, in a sense, no present in this play—the future (the future fame of these protagonists, the future fate of this story) so shadows the present at every turn that “this extant moment” (4.5.168) is swallowed up by “what’s past and what’s to come” (4.5.166); we struggle in vain to “occupy the same time” or “put ourselves in their [these characters’] present” (MWM, p. 334; p. 337; Cavell’s italics) because “this requires making their present theirs” (MWM, p. 337), and—to cut a long story short (so to speak)—it isn’t. “’Tis done, ’tis past, and yet it is not” (5.2.97), says Cressida, struggling uselessly to create her own fate. These legendary figures cannot inhabit their own present; as Linda Charnes puts it, “this play afflicts the characters with a historical ‘knowledge’ that contaminates most, if not all, of their verbal intercourse.”13 We are constantly being reminded of the well-known ending of the story, the way “that old common arbitrator, Time, / Will one day end it” (4.5.225–26). “Envious and calumniating Time” (3.3.174) is repeatedly personified in the play—as an all-consuming scavenger, a thief snatching at scraps of history with which to cram up his thievery, a vulture pouncing upon the leftovers of every human deed. If in the tragedies we are always aware of an obscure sense that things could be different (if only, if only . . .), here we are repeatedly reminded of the ineluctability and belatedness of the goings-on. The action is so constantly the past of the future present that our anticipation trumps our participation at every turn.

Here too, Shakespeare may have felt for his protagonists—may have been engaged in a similar struggle to give them room for some sort of presence—above all, through his extraordinary handling of time. Elizabeth Freund’s description of the play’s foreclosure of freedom in time is instructive: “In re-imagining and re-citing the received narratives and commonplaces, Shakespeare plays every proleptic, analeptic, and metaleptic game possible with his counters. Thus [for example] the notion that ‘Helen must needs be fair, when with your blood you daily paint her thus’ (1.1.90–91) transumptively substitutes the casus belli with desire for cause. Rhetoric leapfrogs diachrony, opening a multitude of alternative possibilities for reinterpretation, then foreclosing them.”14 In the end, though, Shakespeare’s hands, like those of his characters, are tied, however he tried to wriggle free—not only by playing fast and loose with time but also by playing with genre, as if he was asking in frustration: “Must I fit in? Am I condemned to repeat my precursors?” It is all done and dusted, and—for just the same reason, that there can never be any present—the play has no satisfactory end-point, no real stopping place where we can put our skepticism to rest. Notoriously, the play seems to try repeatedly to end without succeeding in doing so—several times we are given couplets which round things off nicely and provide stock pairs of concluding lines—only for the play to continue “Sans check” (1.3.94): Achilles, after slaughtering Hector: “Come, tie his body to my horse’s tail, / Along the field I will the Trojan trail” (5.9.21–22); Agamemnon, trying to sound a note of finality: “If in his death the gods have us befriended, / Great Troy is ours, and our sharp wars are ended” (5.10.9–10); Troilus, trying to exit with dignity: “Strike a free march to Troy, with comfort go: / Hope of revenge shall hide our inward woe” (5.11.30–31)—only for Pandarus to enter to speak his epilogue.15 Try as they might, they simply cannot stop—cannot find a resting-point, cannot cease to be the characters they are forced to be: “let all pitiful goers-between be called to the world’s end after my name: call them all panders; let all constant men be Troiluses, all false women Cressids . . .” (3.2.180–82). It can only end with the world’s end. There is no possibility for recovery; the autonomy is always already foreclosed. There is the sense of a Nietzschean revenge against time here—but the eternal recurrence rolls on without, apparently, anyone having had the original freedom to choose.

Indeed, the only terminus that can be imagined for the action is that of self-consumption, of insatiable appetite, the “universal wolf” which “last eat[s] up himself” (1.3.121–24); the play reiterates this idea: “He that is proud eats up himself” (2.3.156); and again, “lechery eats itself” (5.4.35). This is something like what Cavell has called “the circle of cannibalism, of the eater eaten by what he or she eats” (DK, p. 152). Troilus and Cressida’s constant reversion to the idea of cannibalism shows failure of acknowledgment of finitude here—a connection Cavell has made (relating cannibalism and narcissism) in both the drama of the unknown woman and Coriolanus. Here too, there is “a systematic symbology of food” thematizing “human desire as (transfigured) hunger” (CT, p. 20; cf. CR, p. 480). The notion of cannibalism constitutes perhaps the most concrete imagining of a way of overcoming the separateness or exteriority of the other, and the play’s strongly incorporative power makes it almost seem as if the play itself is cannibalistic, denying the audience’s separateness from the words circulated onstage. But Troilus and Cressida also imagines that the end-product of this cannibalism will be not just a “fullness” (4.4.3; 4.5.271; 5.1.9) but also a “disgorg[ing]” (Prologue, 12) and a “belching” (5.5.23), born of having “o’er-eaten” (5.2.158)—and the ensuing nausea, associated with the “spoils” (4.5.62), the rancid leftovers, “The lees and dregs” (4.1.63); the “orts [. . .] The fragments, scraps, the bits and greasy relics” (5.2.157–58). I have elsewhere characterized Troilus and Cressida as a bulimic play (SE, pp. 69–71). If, then, as I argue, the lion’s share of the imagery of food and eating in the play is cannibalistic, the nausea evoked can be seen as pointing to the failure of acknowledgement attendant upon this kind of concrete attempt to overcome separateness.

A similarly concrete evocation of the forced bridging of separateness can be seen in the frequent idea of go-betweens in the play: between Cressida and Troilus, between the two camps and the various factions within each, and between the onstage action and the audience, we are constantly watching mediation, through negotiators, brokers, meddlers, and panders; even the personified Time, as we’ve just seen, is described as “that old common arbitrator” (4.5.225)—and, earlier, as a midwife (1.3.313–14). I take the centrality of the character of Pandarus as paradigmatic of what we could call a lack of transitional space; what Cavell might call a breach of immediacy, for these multiple go-betweens destroy the possibility of “shared intimacy”—between the characters as well as between the audience and the action; as Dawson puts it, “even the most intimate moments in the play seem ‘staged’” (NCS, p. 21). Cressida and Troilus” radically attenuated intimacy is a long way from the Cavellian ideal of “privacy shared”; it is privacy turned inside-out, horribly mangled by the constant meddling and intervention of Pandarus. With him around, they never stand a chance. At no point does their repartee—poor thing—come close to the happy banter of the comedies; if banter is a kind of alchemy, mixing loving and warring impulses to create that “meet and happy conversation” of an ideal marriage, the rubbing-against-each-other of love and war in Troilus and Cressida is failed alchemy, reducing both war and love to little more than manifestations of “the hot passion of distempered blood” (2.2.170), of an all-pervasive appetite, “as though [as Joel Fineman has put it] in Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare had turned against desire itself.”16 The many “poor agents” and “goers-between” all work to breach rather than create intimacy, as well as establishing an economy of exchange which figures characters as little more than fungible chips or counters. And just as the lovers are never really free to face each other unfettered by Pandarus, we are never free to make these characters present to us as a matter of our own choice. Hence the disturbing strangeness of Pandarus’ turning to the audience leeringly in the middle of the play, when the lovers are about to go to bed for the first (and only) time, breaking the theatrical illusion with: “And Cupid grant all tongue-tied maidens here / Bed, chamber, pander, to provide this gear” (3.2.188–89). In Hamlet, written around the same time as Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet denounces the way “reason panders will” (3.4.88)17—that is, rationality acts as a go-between or procurer (Cavell might term it a cover story) for sheer desire, especially sexual desire; a wonderfully condensed phrase for so much of what Cavell has to say. It is Pandarus who is given the last word in this play, with his determinedly offensive epilogue in which he bequeaths his syphilis to the audience, whom he refers to as “traders in the flesh” (5.11.44)—turning us too into bawds and pimps; go-betweens like himself.18 The call upon the audience here is the call of a procurer in the market.

What Cavell refers to as “our hiddenness, our silence and our placement” in the theatre are all undone (MWM, p. 343). Like so many others amongst the issues I have been discussing here, this process—the degradation of “the state of our participation in this ceremony of theatre” (DK, p. 18)—can be seen most clearly in the betrayal scene—Act 5 scene 2, which can be taken at one and the same time as an allegory of ways of being an audience and a portrait of the emergence of what philosophy knows as skepticism out of jealousy. The layering technique of this scene—we watch Thersites watching Ulysses watching Troilus watching Cressida dallying with Diomedes—demolishes the parentheses placed, according to Cavell, around dramatic action; instead of allowing us to return to reality upon the closing of the dramatic brackets—giving us as it were a second chance—this technique more or less forces us into the theatrical world, making theatricality into a form of voyeurism. And the fracturing of viewpoint destroys the community of the watchers: we observe a layering of entirely disjunctive perspectives. Take your choice: Thersites’ invective, Ulysses’ cynically urbane pretence of astonishment, Troilus’ impotent anguish, and beyond these—what? Cressida is as opaque to Diomedes as he is to her (and as, for all we know, they are to themselves). There is nothing but theatricalization, no end in sight, no possibility of delimiting the isolation. And Troilus’ non-intervention here cannot be held at arms length: it moulds our own reaction. Compare this to Cavell’s description of the position of the audience in tragedy: “Their fate, up there, is that they must act, they are in the arena in which action is ineluctable. My freedom is that I am not now in the arena. Everything which can be done is being done” (MWM, pp. 338–39).

So it is particularly telling that this scene is simultaneously a portrait of the onset of radical skepticism. Here is Troilus’ great speech upon witnessing Cressida’s faithlessness:

This she? No, this is Diomed’s Cressida If beauty have a soul, this is not she, If souls guide vows, if vows be sanctimonies, If sanctimony be the gods” delight, If there be rule in unity itself, This is not she. O madness of discourse That cause sets up with and against itself— Bifold authority, where reason can revolt Without perdition, and loss assume all reason Without revolt! This is, and is not, Cressid. Within my soul there doth conduce a fight Of this strange nature: that a thing inseparate Divides more wider than the sky and earth, And yet the spacious breadth of this division Admits no orifex for a point as subtle As Ariachne’s broken woof to enter. (5.2.136–51)

“This is, and is not, Cressid”: perhaps here is the first inkling of the enormous power of skepticism, and a first sense of what tragedy can do with it: “By the world, / I think my wife be honest, and think she is not, [. . .] I’ll have some proof” (Othello, 3.3.389–92). Troilus’ hyperbolic reaction to Cressida’s betrayal is perhaps the most overt depiction in Shakespeare of what Cavell calls “the logic, the emotion, and the scene of skepticism epitomized” (CR, p. 483)—the conversion of jealousy into an epistemological problem, doubt about the other extending its affective aegis to a generalized, abstract doubt about the “unity” of truth itself. In Troilus’ incomprehension and sense of impending madness we can see writ large the skeptical withdrawal of the world—the loss of any assured ground upon which to stand, of any criteria by which to know the other (DK, p. 26).

Here as elsewhere in Shakespeare, the move from the particular to the general gives an insight not only into the sources of philosophical skepticism but also, simultaneously, into the roots of misogyny, connected as it can be to a form of possessiveness—the scene provides Troilus with fodder for his already-evident misogyny (“O that I thought it could be in a woman . . .”—3.2.138): “Cressid is mine”—insofar as she is “a thing inseparate”—an object that can be exclusively, wholly possessed. We can connect this craving for totality to the earlier hyperbole of Troilus” characterization of desire—“This is the monstrosity of love, lady, that the will is infinite and the execution confined, that the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit” (3.2.69–71): desire here—to quote Cavell writing about Coriolanus again—“has a structure of endlessness”; it is by definition unsatisfiable (DK, p. 149). And Troilus’ reaction to this disappointment is to turn to world-consuming revenge as, quite explicitly, a cover story: “Hope of revenge shall hide our inward woe” (5.11.30–31). And again: “Let’s leave the hermit Pity with our mother, / And when we have our armours buckled on, / The venomed vengeance ride upon our swords” (5.3.45–47); here again the gender dynamics are clear for all to see; and the insatiability of desire has become the insatiability of revenge.

But the endlessness of revenge does not feel contained within the parentheses of the play. This is, I am suggesting, the place where -Shakespeare came closest to the straightforward enactment of his own skepticism, closest to “the loss of the idea of the human” (DK, p. 36) with no hope of recovery. Troilus and Cressida is skeptical about the value of literature, skeptical about the value of philosophy, skeptical therefore about the value of the human as such; it gives us no place from which we can put a stop to what Cavell calls our “sponsorship of evil in the world” (MWM, p. 339). For how would one go about undoing the ways in which this play dissolves community and destroys ordinary connections to the world? How would one try to make these characters present to us? The play deliberately leaves no room for perfectionism—neither for its protagonists, nor for us.

If Cavell’s central question, throughout his work, is “To what may we aspire?” (DK, p. 20)—perhaps his avoidance of this play is understandable. Perhaps he did not want to think of Shakespeare in quite so dark, so despairing a place. And who could blame him?

University of Cambridge

1. Cited in the New Variorum Edition of Troilus and Cressida, ed. Harold N. Hillebrand and T. W. Baldwin (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1953), p. 523.
2. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 3 (recently reissued as Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare). Hereafter abbreviated DK.
3. All quotations from the play are from Anthony B. Dawson, ed., Troilus and Cressida, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Hereafter abbreviated NCS.
4. Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 3; hereafter abbreviated CT.
5. Richard P. Wheeler, “Acknowledging Shakespeare: Cavell and the Claim of the Human,” in The Senses of Stanley Cavell, ed. Richard Fleming and Michael Payne (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1989), pp. 132–60, 146–47.
6. Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 74. Compare W. R. Bion’s psychoanalytic conceptualization of attacks on “linking” mechanisms, in Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis (London: Heinemann, 1967).
7. On this topic, see my Shakespeare’s Entrails: Belief, Scepticism and the Interior of the Body (London: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 58–79; hereafter abbreviated SE.
8. This issue is self-consciously addressed through the puns on “generals” as military leaders. Note Thersites’ quibbling ways with the word: “Agamemnon—how if he had boils, full, all over, generally? [. . .] And those boils did run—say so—did not the general run then? Were not that a botchy core?” (2.1.2–5).
9. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 43; hereafter abbreviated MWM. Cf. Elizabeth Freund, “Ariachne’s Broken Woof: The Rhetoric of Citationality in Troilus and Cressida,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, eds. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartmann (New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 19–36; p. 21. Linda Charnes’s Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 70–102, similarly stresses issues of citationality in the play.
10. Sandra Laugier, “Rethinking the Ordinary: Austin after Cavell,” in Contending with Stanley Cavell, ed. Russell B. Goodman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 82–99, p. 83.
11. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 351; hereafter abbreviated CR.
12. “No traditional story was so popular in the Elizabethan Age as that of the siege of Troy and some of its episodes”: J. S. P. Tatlock, “The Siege of Troy in Elizabethan Literature, Especially in Shakespeare and Heywood,” PMLA 30 (December 1915): 676–78; cited in Robert Kimbrough, Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida” and its Setting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 27.
13. Charnes, Notorious Identity, p. 76.
14. Freund, “Ariachne’s Broken Woof,” pp. 32–33.
15. Patricia Parker, for example, describes Troilus and Cressida’s continually frustrated promise of an ending or issue, instead of which the play offers “a protracted dilation that is finally only a bloated middle”—Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 226.
16. Joel Fineman, “Fratricide and Cuckoldry: Shakespeare’s Doubles,” in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and CoppŽlia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 70–109, p. 100.
17. Quotations from Shakespeare’s plays other than Troilus and Cressida follow The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974).
18. On the way Troilus and Cressida “work[s] to extend the logic of the play from the relations among characters to the relations between characters and audience,” see Harry Berger, Jr., “Troilus and Cressida: The Observer as Basilisk,” in Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making, ed. John Patrick Lynch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 130–46; p. 141. See also Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Morality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) pp. 27–28, on the play’s degradation of theatre as a contaminating pestilence.