payment page
Summary
In the Greek camp, the newly arrived Cressida is greeted by all the Greek commanders. Ulysses insists that she be kissed by everyone, only then refusing to kiss her himself—and when she is gone, he declares that she is a loose, unvirtuous woman. Then the Trojan lords arrive, and the conditions of the duel are set by Aeneas, who remarks that since Ajax and Hector are cousins and therefore related, Hector’s whole heart will not be in this fight. As the two combatants prepare, Agamemnon asks Ulysses, “What Trojan is that same that looks so heavy?” (4.5.109). Ulysses tells his general that the downcast Trojan is Troilus and then goes on to praise him profusely, saying that Troilus may even be a greater man than Hector.
Ajax and Hector fight for a time and then break off, agreeing to call the duel a draw and embrace as kinsmen. Then Hector is invited to come unarmed to the Greek tents, since Achilles desires to see him. Hector agrees to come, accompanied by Troilus. He meets the Greek commanders and greets them one by one, exchanging compliments down the line until he reaches Achilles, with whom he trades insults. Achilles promises to meet him on the field of battle the following day and kill him. Hector retorts that he looks forward to their meeting. On that note, the Greek lords lead their guests to the feast. As they go, Troilus asks Ulysses where Calchas’s tent lies, planning to find Cressida there later that night. Ulysses promises to lead him there, but he also notes that Diomedes has been looking at Cressida lustfully.
After the feast, Achilles boasts to Patroclus of how he will kill Hector the next day. Just then, the two encounter Thersites, who delivers a letter to Achilles before unloading his usual torrent of abuse on them and on the entire campaign. The letter is from the Trojan princess whom Achilles loves, and it begs him not to fight the next day. He tells Patroclus sadly that he must obey her wishes. They go out, and Thersites remains, watching from the shadows as the feast breaks up. Most of the lords go to bed, but Diomedes slips off to see Cressida, and Ulysses and Troilus follow him. Noting that Diomedes is an untrustworthy, lustful rogue, Thersites follows as well.
Analysis
When we last saw Cressida, she was in tears over being separated from Troilus and promising to be true to him forever. Her transformation, however, proceeds quickly—she is cheerful and even coquettish upon her arrival in the Greek camp, adapting to her new situation with ease and bantering flirtatiously with her captors. Ulysses, ever wise, sees her for what she is. He suggests that everyone kiss her, and when she accepts their kisses without complaint, he declares, “Her wanton spirits look out / At every joint and motive of her body” (4.5.65–66). The reader may protest that he is somewhat unfair to Cressida, since the entire kissing routine was Ulysses’s idea in the first place, but at this point Shakespeare ceases to treat her fairly. Up to this point he has depicted her with sympathy—at least, with as much sympathy as anyone in the play receives. Now, however, she is to be depicted as the wanton woman audiences of Shakespeare’s time would have expected.
Meanwhile, the play’s habit of anticlimax continues in the duel between Ajax and Hector. Even though so much of the action in previous scenes has been leading to this moment, the duel falls completely flat. The two fight for a moment, grow weary, and then call a truce. Clearly, neither means to kill the other, as indicated by all the talk about how the combatants are related. The combatants also enter the duel with an apparently ambivalent attitude about whether they should be fighting to the death. These equivocations suggest that we are meant to be more concerned with the things going on around this supposedly central event, especially the exchange of insults between Hector and Achilles (foreshadowing the final duel—although that will also be an anticlimax) and the keen observations of Ulysses. Achilles sinks even lower in our estimation, since he cannot even manage to be courteous to a guest and is absurdly boastful to Patroclus (his “masculine whore” [5.1.18], in Thersites’s words) about how he will kill Hector the next day.
Ulysses’s skills as a spymaster are on display once again in the first scene of act 5. More perceptive than anyone else around him, he picks up on Diomedes’s intent to pursue Cressida and leads Troilus to their tent to watch. Of course, it’s open to debate whether Ulysses is doing Troilus a favor by alerting him to his beloved’s infidelity. Audiences already familiar with the story of Troilus and Cressida will likely understand Ulysses’s action as necessitated by the plot and hence not think much more about it. However, it’s worth considering this Greek leader’s intentions. As we saw in the final scene of act 4, Ulysses has as high an opinion of Troilus as he does a low opinion of Cressida. When Troilus appears at the duel between Ajax and Hector, Agamemnon asks who he is, and Ulysses responds with a speech in which he sings the young man’s praises: “Speaking in deeds, and deedless in his tongue, / Not soon provoked, nor being provoked soon calmed, / His heart and hand both open and both free” (4.5.112–14). If Ulysses feels compelled to reveal Cressida’s infidelity, it’s arguably out of a desire to protect this honorable young man from an unfaithful woman.
The last words before Troilus’s illusions about his beloved are dashed come, appropriately, from Thersites. “Nothing but lechery!” he cries: “All incontinent varlets!” (5.1.106). One feels that his disgust is justified, and that his commentary on the scene could equally apply to the play as a whole.
