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When they’ve said “as false
As air, as water, wind or sandy earth,
As fox to lamb, or wolf to heifer’s calf,
Pard to the hind, or stepdame to her son,”
Yea, let them say, to stick the heart of falsehood,
“As false as Cressid.” (3.2.193–98)
After Troilus has uttered his lofty pledge of fidelity to Cressida, Cressida echoes it with this pledge of her own. Ominously, however, whereas Troilus couched his pledge in the language of truth, Cressida frames her pledge in the language of falsehood. Though the basic sense of her words is that she will be true to Troilus, she uses a negative rhetorical form to suggest a curse that future generations may use if, in the end, she turns out to be false. Shakespeare uses this negative rhetoric to foreshadow Cressida’s infidelity. This language also foreshadows the curse that Troilus will make in his pained cry: “O Cressid! O false Cressid! False, false, false!” (5.2.208).
In kissing, do you render or receive? (4.5.40)
Cressida speaks this line to Menelaus as she arrives at the Greek camp. This is her first line in the scene, though she’s been onstage for a while, passing along a queue of Greeks and kissing each in turn. After having kissed Agamemnon, Nestor, Achilles, and Patroclus, she reaches Menelaus. He asks her if he, too, will receive a kiss, and this is her flirtatious response. As their conversation continues, it becomes more suggestive, with the two bartering over how many kisses to exchange with each other. This overtly flirtatious behavior is shocking, since Cressida has only just parted from Troilus at the end of the previous scene—mere moments from the audience’s perspective. Ulysses, who looks on disapprovingly, will shortly conclude that Cressida is little more than a whore.
Well, well, ’tis done, ’tis past. And yet it is not.
I will not keep my word. (5.2.117–18)
Cressida says these lines just before she submits herself to Diomedes as Troilus watches on secretly from the shadows. This is the moment that clinches her infidelity, and yet her language has a strange, vacillating quality. This quality captures something essential about her character as Shakespeare presents it. From her first scene with Troilus, Cressida has reflected on how she doesn’t fully know her own mind—a fact that has made her repeated pledges of faithfulness feel increasingly fragile. In this scene, she’s played both hot and cold with Diomedes, at one moment giving him Troilus’s love token and at another trying to take it back. Now, just before she makes her final submission, she’s still equivocating. She says that her vow is both broken and not broken. It’s broken in the sense that she’s decided to have sex with Diomedes, and yet she hasn’t actually slept with him yet. She acts as though she has no choice, even as her language acknowledges that she does.
