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Summary
In Troy, Pandarus converses with a servant while he waits to speak with Paris and Helen. When they come in, he compliments Helen profusely and asks her to excuse Troilus if Priam asks about him at dinner that night. Paris and Helen ask where Troilus will be dining, and Pandarus refuses to tell him. However, they both guess that he will be in pursuit of Cressida, and they make bawdy jokes about it as they depart to greet the warriors returning from battle.
Pandarus finds Troilus pacing about impatiently in an orchard and assures him that his desire for Cressida will soon be satisfied. He goes out, leaving Troilus giddy with expectation, and brings in Cressida. After urging them to embrace, Pandarus departs. Left alone, they profess their love for one another, and they pledge to be faithful to each other. Pandarus returns, and Cressida, worried about what she is doing, considers leaving. But Troilus reassures her and again pledges to be faithful, declaring that future historians will say of all lovers that they were as “true as Troilus” (3.2.183). Cressida declares that if she ever strays from him, she hopes that people will say of false lovers that they were as “false as Cressid” (3.2.198). Pandarus observes the compact and then leads them off to a secluded bedchamber to consummate their passion.
Meanwhile, in the Greek encampment, Cressida’s father, Calchas, who has betrayed Troy by joining the Greeks, asks Agamemnon to grant him a favor. He asks that they exchange the Trojan commander Antenor, whom they have recently captured, for his daughter, so that he might be reunited with her. Agamemnon agrees and orders Diomedes to supervise the exchange. On Ulysses’s advice, the Greek commanders then file past Achilles’s tent, and scorn the proud warrior, ignoring his greetings and making him uneasy. Confused, Achilles approaches Ulysses and asks him why he is being scorned. Ulysses tells him that he is no longer a hero: Ajax is now the man of the hour, while Achilles’s own heroic exploits are in the past. That, says Ulysses, is the way the world works: “the present eye praises the present object” (3.3.186), and good deeds are quickly forgotten. He then informs Achilles that he knows a secret—namely, that Achilles is in love with a Trojan princess. He suggests that Achilles could restore his fame and honor if he stopped dallying with enemy women and took the field.
After Ulysses leaves, Patroclus tells Achilles to follow Ulysses’s advice. Seeing that his “reputation is at stake” (3.3.237), Achilles agrees. Thersites comes in and reports that Ajax is now striding about the camp, completely puffed up with his own importance. Patroclus persuades the foul-tongued fool to talk Ajax into bringing Hector, safely conducted by Agamemnon, to Achilles’s tent after their fight the next day, so that Achilles may speak with Hector.
Analysis
After a long hiatus amid the Greek camp and the political counsels of the Trojans, the action finally returns to the romance of the play’s title. (It is, indeed, one of the weaknesses in the story that the romance and the political action are not integrated until late in the play.) These scenes mark the culmination of Troilus and Cressida’s romance—one cannot exactly call it courtship, since it seems pointed toward mere sexual consummation of their passion, not marriage. Their professions of love are poetic and contain a number of memorable phrases, including Troilus’s comment: “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” (3.2.81–83). This idea is appropriate to a play in which the lovers are “confined” and “slaves to limit”—that is, to the limits imposed by the political situation in which they find themselves. Cressida’s pledge to remain true to Troilus carries a poignant sense of foreshadowing, since the audience knows that she will not remain true, and that “false as Cressid” (3.2.198) will in fact become a common expression.
However, the scene is not nearly as poignant as it might be, since the eager Pandarus—who seems to derive an almost voyeuristic pleasure from his role as go-between—is constantly popping in, interjecting a sordid note into the proceedings. The contrast with, say, Romeo and Juliet, is striking. In that play, too, there is a go-between (Friar Laurence) who brings the lovers together, but their love is consummated after marriage, whereas Troilus and Cressida never even mention matrimony. For them, despite the pretty poetry, lust appears to be the driving emotion. In this regard, it’s worth noting a brief speech Troilus gives prior to Cressida’s appearance, where he comments on the titillation of anticipation: “Th’ imaginary relish is so sweet / That it enchants my sense. What will it be / When that the wat’ry palate taste indeed / Love’s thrice-repurèd nectar?” (3.2.18–21). The way his anticipation leads him to idealize the prospect of sexual consummation recalls an earlier speech where Cressida first confessed her love for Troilus: “Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing” (1.3.294). Yet if the best part of courtship lies in the anticipation of its consummation, then we might expect things to go downhill for these lovers from now on.
In the Greek camp, Ulysses’s cunning is on display in the way he manipulates Achilles. His lengthy discourse on time and reputation, which is his second great philosophical speech, convinces Achilles that his reputation is on the wane: “Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back / Wherein he puts alms for oblivion, / A great-sized monster of ingratitudes. / Those scraps are good deeds past, which are devoured / As fast as they are made, forgot as soon / As done” (3.3.150–55). Even more effective, though, is the blackmail that follows, as Ulysses reveals that he knows all about Achilles’s affair with an unnamed Trojan woman. Recalling his earlier speech on the importance of a working hierarchy, Ulysses describes a certain “mystery / . . . in the soul of state” (3.3.10–11), one that relates to the art of espionage. Without disclosing the source of his information, he claims to know about “all the commerce” Achilles has had with Troy (3.3.214), and he is willing to use it to ensure Achilles falls in line. It is Ulysses’s role as spy—perhaps resembling the spymasters of Queen Elizabeth—that has led some critics to suggest that he, and not Achilles, is the play’s true villain.
