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Summary
At Calchas’s tent, Diomedes calls to Cressida. Her father fetches her, while Troilus and Ulysses watch from one hiding place and Thersites from another. With Thersites’s profanity and Troilus’s shock providing a counterpoint, Diomedes woos Cressida, who behaves reluctantly but coyly toward his advances, fending him off for a time but never allowing him to leave. Eventually, she gives him the sleeve that Troilus presented to her as a love token. She immediately takes it back and says that she never wants to see Diomedes again. Then she softens, gives it to him once more, and promises to wait for him later, when he will come to sleep with her. When she is gone, and Diomedes too, Troilus is in agony, first denying the evidence seen with his own eyes, and then pledging to find Diomedes on the field of battle and kill him. Finally, as morning nears, Aeneas arrives to lead him back to Troy.
In the city, Hector girds for battle, while the women—his wife Andromache and sister Cassandra—plead with him not to go. Both have had dreams that prophesy his death, but he dismisses their warnings. Troilus comes in and says that he will be fighting too; indeed, he chides Hector for having been too merciful to his enemies in the past, saying that today Troilus plans to slay as many men as he can. Cassandra leads Priam in, and the old king pleads with his son not to fight, saying that he too feels foreboding about this day, but Hector refuses to listen and goes out to the battlefield. As Troilus moves to follow, Pandarus brings him a letter from Cressida. Troilus reads the letter, tears it up, and sets off to fight.
As the battle rages, Thersites wanders the field, escaping death by brazen cowardice. Troilus finds Diomedes on the battlefield, but their fighting ends inconclusively, with Diomedes taking command of Troilus’s horse. The Greeks are being driven back, and Hector kills Patroclus. Agamemnon orders his body brought to Achilles, who is roused to fury and joins the battle. He duels with Hector briefly, but tires and retreats. Hector continues slaying, while Achilles finds the Myrmidons, his men, and sets out to find Hector again. Eventually, as the battle nears its close, Achilles and his men find Hector, who has finished fighting and taken off his helmet. Surrounding the unarmed Trojan, they stab him to death. Then, as dusk approaches and both armies sound their retreat for the day, the Myrmidons attach Hector’s corpse to the tail of Achilles’s horse and drag it across the battlefield. The Trojan soldiers are grief-stricken, and Troilus leads them into the city to bring the heavy news. On the way, he encounters Pandarus and curses him. Left alone on the stage, the unhappy Pandarus wonders why he should be so abused when his services were so eagerly desired only a little while before.
Analysis
Cressida’s “fall” to Diomedes bears a marked resemblance to her earlier “fall” to Troilus. In each case, there is a (feigned?) reluctance to go along with the wooer, and in each case she eventually yields. If one considers Troilus and Cressida a tragedy—a debatable notion—then this is the tragic climax. When Troilus finally realizes that his beloved is not all that he thought she was, he cries in despair (5.2.166–71):
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.
His grief is genuine, even if one might point out that he should have known better. And in his grief, Troilus is transformed from a promising but inexperienced young man into a bloodthirsty warrior. Thrumming with a desire for vengeance against Diomedes and the Greeks more broadly, he insists on entering the fray of battle. He even chides Hector for exhibiting the “vice of mercy” (5.3.4) and not brutally slaying every Greek he encounters. Arguably, then, Troilus’s tragedy is not his betrayal by Cressida, but rather his abandonment of the idea of honor as he gives in to bloodlust and the quest for revenge.
If Cressida’s infidelity is the climax of the romantic plot, then the duel between Hector and Achilles should be the climax of the political narrative. We have the foreboding prophecies of Andromache, Cassandra, and Priam, and Hector’s tragic refusal to listen to them, followed by the death of Patroclus, which finally rouses Achilles to action. The action all seems to be moving toward a great showdown. But as is true throughout the play, their confrontation is a letdown. Instead of a climactic battle, we have a brief swordfight from which Achilles flees, and then the brutal murder of an unarmed Hector a few scenes later, where the stage directions leave it ambiguous as to whether Achilles strikes the deathblow: “The Myrmidons kill Hector” (5.10.11). This is a departure from the Iliad, where Hector dies in a fair fight. However, it is entirely true to Achilles’s dishonorable character in Troilus and Cressida, and it brings the play to an appropriately anticlimactic end. Just as there is no justice for Hector, Troilus is unsuccessful in his bid for revenge. Not only does he fail to kill Diomedes, but he loses his horse in the process, making Diomedes “[Cressida’s] knight by proof” (5.5.5).
As if to signal the moral bankruptcy of it all, Shakespeare ends the play with a pathetic speech by Pandarus. Despite having begun the play as a man of honor who struggled to find a balance as a go-between for Troilus and Cressida, by the play’s end he has been reduced to little more than a “pander”—which is to say, a pimp. As suggested by the analysis in the two paragraphs above, Shakespeare underscores similar examples of decline throughout the play’s final act. But perhaps the most powerful example occurs when Hector, just before he fights Achilles, pursues an unnamed Greek on the battlefield. After he kills him, he remarks, “Most putrefied core, so fair without, / Thy goodly armor thus hath cost thy life” (5.9.1–2). Since we are given no knowledge of the dead Greek’s identity, it is an obscure passage, but the image of a beautiful veneer hiding corruption seems to speak for the entire play, in which noble warriors turn out to be brutes, and beautiful women are revealed to be shallow and disloyal. It is, in the end, a profoundly pessimistic story, one that compels us to recall the incisive words Thersites declaimed all the way back in act 2: “War and lechery confound all!” (2.3.80).
