Much has already been said about the medieval/early modern temporal divide and how unfairly it casts the Middle Ages in the role of the Other of whatever we, defined as modern, believe or want to believe ourselves to be. While no one denies that the invention of the printing press, the Reformation or the discovery of the Americas brought about important changes, the division between premodern and modern has become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, where everything that is assumed to be a characteristic of the modern period, whether subjectivity, the nation state, capitalism or secularization, is readily assumed to have had its origins in the era defined as “early modern”. As Margreta de Grazia notes, the border between the Middle Ages and modernity is in effect paralleled only by that between before and after the birth of Christ, so that on which side of the divide one exists determines salvation in the case of the B.C./A.D. divide and relevance in the case of the medieval/early modern divide (de Grazia 2007). The period boundary is, therefore, in effect less a historical marker than a value judgement (ibid.). The problem with binary oppositions is that they carry an inherent hierarchy and, as Holly Crocker argues, the concept of the “premodern” should therefore be approached as a problem rather than a period (Crocker 2016). Walter Benjamin, among others, pointed out the importance of bearing in mind that the past is a relational category and that we cannot access the past itself, but that when we encounter the past, we enter into a specific relationship with it.Footnote 1 It is therefore often more fruitful to ask for a particular period’s functions for the discourses of later periods than to establish any certainties about the period itself. This becomes especially interesting in the case of the Middle Ages, as they have more often than other periods been constructed as the present’s Other.Footnote 2 An Other is created from that parts that the Self chooses not to acknowledge, and that it therefore externalizes and projects elsewhere, for example in the woman, from the perspective of a male-centred anthropology, in the animal, from an anthropocentric point of view, or in geographically or temporally distant cultures, in an area or a past different from the here and now. While the process of differentiation enables the Self to define itself, the (fictional) separation from negative qualities creates an illusion of mastery (Ashcroft et al. 1998). The concept of a “self-consolidating other” (Spivak 1985) is derived from Jacques Lacan’s description of the basic formation of identity and the verb, “Othering”, was coined for the process of collective identity formation by Gayatri Spivak in a conference on “Europe and its Others” (Spivak 1985). Othering describes the mechanisms by which a Self constructs an Other, often in binary opposition, from those parts that it chooses not to acknowledge. This process is called Othering because those factors of the Self that are perceived as negative are projected elsewhere—on an Other created specifically for this purpose, which thus turns out as the Self’s binary opposite. As Michel de Certeau has pointed out, our image of the past, too, tends to be pre-structured by the idea that the past, by necessity, constitutes an Other (de Certeau 1988). We encounter the past with the expectation of encountering cultural alterity, because we assume an a priori gap between the present and the past. Therefore discourse on the past is informed by prevalent notions of alterity. This concerns the Middle Ages in particular, since the Middle Ages has more often than other times been assigned the role of, as Lee Patterson calls it, an “all-purpose other” (Patterson 1994).

Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, I would like to argue, demonstrates how the historical Other is performatively created—and, simultaneously, subverted—in the way the two opposing parties are drawn. As Eric Mallin has shown, in Troilus and Cressida, the two parties of the Trojan war are assigned to different historical epochs. The Trojans are made to represent a medieval world of chivalry, honesty and humility, while the Greeks appear to belong to a Renaissance world of cynicism, dissimulation and arrogance (Mallin 1995). There are also different literary modes of expression aligned with these categories: the medieval Trojan world is associated with poetry, and the early modern Greeks belong to a world of drama. Especially the two archetypal heroes of their parties, Hector and Achilles, form a complementary unit up to the point where they become indistinguishable: In the scene of Hector and Achilles’ final encounter on the battlefield, the dichotomy that had been established throughout the play gets blurred when, in a sonnet-like sequence that aligns the two with the protagonists of Romeo and Juliet, the lines of demarcation collapse, and the two elements of the binary opposition become one.

From their first appearance on stage, in a scene where the Trojan heroes discuss the question of whether or not the war should be continued, their debate abounds with expressions from chivalry, noble warfare, the code of knightly conduct, honour etc. The word “glory” is repeated several times (2.2.195, 2.2.204), as is “honour” (2.2.4, 2.2.26, 2.2.68, 2.2.199), and Troilus quotes the whole canon of knightly ideals in his argument: apart from “glory” (twice in a few lines) and “honour”, he talks of “renown”, “courage”, “fame” or “magnanimous deeds”, and uses adjectives like “valiant”, “worthy”, and “brave” (2.2.195–206). It is important to note, however, that the code of knightly conduct, as it is presented in the Trojan leaders’ debate, demands two mutually exclusive actions: the Trojans must do both, end the war and continue it, as to keep Helen is dishonourable, but so is returning her and thereby ending the war. The contradictions inherent in the code of chivalry are thus made visible from the start, and the “medieval” Trojan world is shown not as a simpler and better world, but as an impossible one.

The Trojans are not only connected with the chivalric ideals of honour and success in battle (even if this success exists only as an ideal), but with the courtly love tradition as well. Here, too, the Trojans appear as slightly outdated; noble, but ultimately unfit for the struggle for survival: The Trojan Troilus appears as a Petrarchan lover whose love (that is not even unrequited) makes him incapable of doing anything: “I am […] tamer than sleep,” he says in the very first scene, “fonder than ignorance,/[…] And skilless as unpractised infancy,” (1.1.9–12), and this is indeed how he is presented for the most part of the play.

When the Trojan Aeneas, in Hector’s name, challenges the Greeks to a duel, we are transferred to the world of medieval romance, where knights fight in tiltyards for the favour of their ladies:

He [Hector] bade me take a trumpet,

And to this purpose speak: ‘Kings, princes, lords,

If there be one among the fair’st of Greece

[…]

That loves his mistress more than in confession

With truant vows to her own lips he loves,

And dare avow her beauty and her worth

In other arms than hers; to him this challenge:

Hector, in view of Trojans and of Greeks,

Shall make it good, or do his best to do it,

[….]

And will tomorrow with his trumpet call,

Midway between your tents and walls of Troy,

To rouse a Grecian that is true in love.

(1.3.263–279)

Lines like “In other arms than hers” or “To rouse a Grecian that is true in love” clearly hold erotic potential. Hector’s call to the duel is expressed in the language of courtship and, as sly Ulysses points out, “This challenge that the gallant Hector sends/However it is spread in general name,/Relates in purpose only to Achilles” (1.3.322–324). Hector melds the chivalric ideals of courtly love and military success here, using the language and the imagery that his “medieval” Trojan setting provides to send a message of erotic courtship disguised as a challenge to a competition on the battlefield. This challenge is generally understood to be directed at Achilles specifically rather than at the Greek army in general. This is the first of several allusions to an erotic attraction between the two principal heroes of “medieval” Troy and “early modern” Greece, and to a conflation of erotic attraction and military contention in the world of these heroes.

The Greeks, on their part, inhabit a world of dissimulation and arrogance. They lack a binding value system and are connected to the art form of drama. When they are mentioned for the first time in the prologue, they are introduced as “princes orgulous, their high blood chafed” (Prologue 2), and the first scene in their camp shows the Greek generals in a crisis: When they discuss why there has been no palpable success in the siege so far, they find that the reason is not Troy’s superior strength, but the fact that in the Greek army “the specialty of rule hath been neglected” (1.3.78) that there is “disorder” (1.3.95) and “chaos” (1.3.125). Most notably,

The great Achilles, whom opinion crowns

The sinew and the forehand of our host,

Having his ear full of his airy fame,

Grows dainty of his worth and in his tent

Lies mocking our designs.

(1.3.142–146)

Achilles’s arrogance stands in stark contrast to the Trojans’ (sometimes exaggerated) humility. When Ulysses describes how Achilles lies in bed all day and amuses himself with Patroclus’ imitations of the Greek heroes, he describes the situation as if he were describing a real theatre, using words like “action”, “player”, “dialogue”, “acts”, or “applause” (1.3.149–163). Achilles appears as stage-director of his own show when he orders Patroclus “play me this, play me that” (e.g. “Now play me Nestor”, 1.3.165) or when he directs Thersites’ railings: “Proceed, Thersites”, he says, “Derive this. Come” (2.3.55–58). Achilles also appears as an actor when he simulates sickness to avoid having to talk to the Greek generals (2.3.66–74), which, evidently, he does not do for the first time, as Agamemnon replies, “We are too well acquainted with these answers” (2.3.111). The Greek princes, in turn, put on a show before Achilles when they pass by his tent pretending not to notice him; this time it is Agamemnon who directs the action (following Ulysses’ instructions, 3.3.38–54).

The Greeks’ lack of success is also presented as being connected to the confusion about social order, an issue that keeps recurring throughout the play. Status insecurity, “hollow factions” (1.3.80) and a lack of respect towards the traditional hierarchy are imagined as physical disorder in space, as in Ulysses’ analogy of the planets roaming astray (1.3.94–101): The whole world falls apart in this picture, the universe reverses back to chaos, because the planets “to disorder wander” (1.3.95). If the Greeks, most especially Achilles, do not follow “the specialty of rule” (1.3.78) and disobey “the glorious planet Sol” (1.3.89), the leader, this will harm society as a whole, maintains Ulysses. It is also a common theme in early modern anti-theatrical tracts that if an ordinary citizen puts on the attire of a gentleman or a boy plays a woman, or other such scandalous excesses, “proportion is so broken” that society falls ill.Footnote 3 To see the present as a time of crisis and the past, by contrast, as a time of stability where things were in order is a topos prevalent already in classical literatureFootnote 4—in this play, the Greeks are in a crisis but it is medieval Troy that is destroyed in the end. Nevertheless there are hints that the Trojan poetry and rhetorics of chivalry are self-consciously enacted and occasionally ironically employed: The Trojan Aeneas performs the challenge to the duel in a theatrical manner and thus undermines the duality at the precise moment it is being established. When addressing the Greek leaders, Aeneas uses the chivalric convention in order to mock Agamemnon and the Greeks with impunity, exaggerating his politeness to such a degree that he is thereby ridiculing its object, for instance when comparing Agamemnon, the Greek leader, to “youthful Phoebus” (1.3.230) and asks his own, Aeneas’s, cheek to “be ready with a blush” (1.3.228) when he sees Agamemnon, but then pretends not to be able to recognize him, and repeatedly asks who of the Greeks is Agamemnon: “Which is that god in office, guiding men?” (1.3.231). He thus demonstrates that he, too, is capable of the more theatrical Greeks’ performance and “ceremon[y]” (1.3.234), suggesting that medieval chivalry, too, is something that needs to be enacted and performed. Besides, this entire scene is taking place on stage, as part of a performance and acted by an actor; actors act as Trojans and as Greeks, so that drama is in a way the basis for both, which reflects the early modern standpoint from which the play is written, and sets limits to the Trojan’s possibilities to employ “their” medium, poetry. On the other hand, when Hector, later in the play, speaks in verse and rhyme, the Greek Achilles chimes in effortlessly. Also, the play itself was possibly not performed, but printed to be read, as the preface of the 1609 edition to the “Ever” or “Eternal Reader” indicates.Footnote 5 These are instances where the lines of the dichotomy prove unstable.

While Achilles appears as the essence of “Greek” in this play, the ultimate Greek hero—the “sinew and forehand of our host” (1.3.143), as the Greeks call him, Hector is the embodiment of the Trojan: He is addressed as “Troy, […] thy heart, thy sinews and thy bone” (5.9.11 f).

There are also various indicators for an erotic attraction between the two, like the suggestive language of the challenge to a duel which Hector sent to Achilles. When Achilles hears of this challenge, he responds in a similar way, saying that,

I have a woman’s longing,

An appetite that I am sick withal,

To see great Hector in his weeds of peace.

(3.3.239–241)

And when Achilles and Hector actually meet, they keep up this suggestive tone (“Now, Hector, I have fed mine eyes on thee” (4.5.231), “Behold thy fill” (4.5.236), etc.), but at the same time they make it clear that they are enemies, so they threaten to kill each other as well. Achilles says he wants to “view [Hector] limb by limb” (4.5.238), while also pointing out that the reason why he is looking at Hector’s body so closely is that he is trying to determine where exactly he will hit him with his sword, in a way that reveals an unusual fascination with Hector’s body:

Tell me, you heavens, in which part of his body

Shall I destroy him? Whether there, or there, or there?

That I may give the local wound a name

And make distinct the very breach whereout

Hector’s great spirit flew.

(4.5.242–246)

The erotic tension and at the same time aggression between Hector and Achilles increases until the scene of their final encounter. Because both of them appear as the personification of what “Trojan” and “Greek” stand for, respectively, what they say and do transcends these individual characters and reveals what is assumed about Greece and Troy more generally. This means that when Achilles kills Hector “in fellest manner” (5.7.6) in Act V, not only the fact that Troy is going to be destroyed is contained in this, but even how it is going to happen: Achilles lets his Myrmidons slaughter Hector when Hector is defenseless. Hector had taken off his armour to put on the armour of an unknown Greek soldier whom he had killed for that purpose. At this point he abandons his code of chivalry and loses his chivalric integrity as he kills out of greed.Footnote 6 This greed makes him forget the necessary caution when he takes off his armour in the middle of the battle, just as the Trojans will soon let greed prevail over prudence when they decide to take the mysterious wooden horse into the city. Achilles kills the defenseless Hector, who had also made the mistake to covet a beautiful but deceiving exterior. The dead body inside the shining armour, addressed as “most putrefied core, so fair without” (5.9.1), alludes to the medieval topos according to which it was Troy’s excess and decadence, its “rottenness”, that led to its destruction. When Achilles addresses Hector before he attacks him, he likens Hector’s end to the end of the day, as if Hector’s life was a natural phenomenon:

Look, Hector, how the sun begins to set,

How ugly night comes breathing at his heels.

Even with the vail and dark’ning of the sun

To close the day up, Hector’s life is done. (5.9.5–8)

On the most obvious level this means that it is getting evening, of course, and that the fighting is done for the day, but not before Hector is killed. On the next level it means that for Hector, life (“the day,” “the sun”) is over, and death (“ugly night”) will take over soon. But at the same time, the metaphor works the other way round, and makes Hector’s life a larger temporal unit and his death a cut that concerns not just himself, but everyone. The sun darkens for everyone when the day, or “Hector’s life is done,” and the destruction of Troy, the end of an era will follow.

Hector, in turn, tries to appeal to Achilles’s sense of honour and the rules of fair play when he says:

I am unarmed. Forgo this vantage, Greek.

(5.9.9)

But Achilles has no mercy, and neither will his countrymen when they kill the sleeping Trojans in the night of Troy’s destruction. Nonetheless, in his answer Achilles takes up and continues Hector’s rhythm and rhyme:

Strike, fellows, strike! This is the man I seek.

(5.9.10)

Here, in their final encounter, Hector and Achilles literally complement each other when one completes the other’s verse. It was Hector who had started speaking in rhymed verse while disarming, indicating that an especially dense and significant passage is about to start.

When Achilles takes up Hector’s rhythm and rhyme, they begin what I would call a slightly disordered sonnet together, or at least a fourteen-line-poem that bears striking resemblance with a sonnet. Its rhyme scheme is a little unorthodox, however. Hector starts with a quatrain in which the last two lines rhyme; then Achilles takes up his metre and this rhyme scheme and continues Hector’s thoughts about the close of day.

The last four lines are spoken during and after the killing of Hector. Immediately afterwards, a retreat sounds from both sides. These lines show great symmetry, and the dialogue and the shared rhymes reflect how the warriors physically approach each other, converge, and separate again when Hector is dead, because their conjunction is not just linguistic. The erotic attraction behind the stated intention to kill had been established on their very first encounter, and was continued to this last one: “Now, Hector, I have fed mine eyes on thee” (4.5.231), Achilles had said when they first met, for example, but at the same time: “Tell me, you heavens, in which part of his body/Shall I destroy him? Whether there, or there, or there?” (4.5.241–242). When Achilles kills Hector, the physical union is consummated, first in the medium of language, then in the flesh, albeit not that directly: It is not Achilles himself who kills Hector, he orders his Myrmidons to do so (which is also a prefiguration of the way the Greeks will swarm out at night and kill the Trojans in the night of Troy’s destruction). The “sonnet” that Achilles and Hector perform together links them to another sonnet sequence in a Shakespeare play, a famous one, namely that in Romeo and Juliet, spoken by Romeo and Juliet together when they meet for the first time. Both sequences arranged side by side, their similarly structured dialogue becomes obvious, a dialogue that has, in Romeo and Juliet, the speakers “converge” in a kiss:

Hector

Most putrefied core, so fair without,

Thy goodly armour thus hast cost thy life.

Now is my day’s work done. I’ll take good breath.

Rest, sword, thou hast thy fill of blood and death.

Romeo

If I profane with my unworthiest hand

This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this,

My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand

To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

Enter Achilles and his Myrmidons

  

Achilles

Look, Hector, how the sun begins to set,

How ugly night comes breathing at his heels.

Even with the vail and dark’ning of the sun

To close the day up, Hector’s life is done.

Juliet

Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,

Which mannerly devotion shows in this,

For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,

And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.

Hector

I am unarmed. Forgo this vantage, Greek.

Romeo

Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

Achilles

Strike, fellows, strike! This is the man I seek.

Juliet

Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

[They fall upon Hector and kill him.]

Romeo

O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;

They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

 

So, Ilium, fall thou! Now, Troy, sink down!

Here lies thy heart, thy sinews and thy bone. –

On, Myrmidons, and cry you all amain,

‘Achilles hath the mighty Hector slain’.

Juliet

Saints do not move, though grant for prayer’s sake.

 

Romeo

Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take.

 

Retreat [sounded from both sides].

(Troilus and Cressida, AS, 5.9.3–14)

 

He kisses her

(Romeo and Juliet, OUP, 1.4.206–219)

The last four lines would be spoken by Romeo alone, if the parallel to Achilles was more complete. Juliet, however, has only one of the last four lines, so the balance is already leaning towards Romeo, and she does not move, as she says: “saints do not move” (1.4.218), and she is a “saint” (1.4.216, 218—she’d been a “shrine” (1.4.207) earlier) at the point where Hector is killed in his and Achilles’s “sonnet”.

The incomplete rhymes give the impression that the sonnet form is briefly quoted, then almost immediately dropped as if at the horror of the scene. When Achilles says, “Look, Hector, how the sun begins to set,/How ugly night comes breathing at his heels” (Troilus and Cressida 5.9.5) conjuring up shadows (“breaths of night”, 5.9.6) from the corners, as it were, to create the appropriate setting for this scene, the visual “dark’ning of the sun” (5.9.7) is accompanied by the cacophony of a distorted sonnet.

Romeo and Juliet are also lovers from two opposed parties and perform a sonnet together in perfect harmony, but at their first encounter as opposed to this very final one between Hector and Achilles. Romeo and Juliet see and approach each other, speak their sonnet together, and then kiss. It is all the more shocking that “the fearful passage” of Achilles and Hector’s “death-marked love” (Romeo and Juliet, PROLOGUE 9) ends not “only” in death as does Romeo and Juliet’s eventually, but in rape and death, because the way Hector dies, his body penetrated by the weapons of Achilles’s Myrmidons, who figure as extension of Achilles, very much resembles a rape.Footnote 7 Romeo and Juliet’s sonnet leads to a kiss. While this parallel casts some shadow on the often idealised love between Romeo and Juliet, which also leads to death and destruction of course, and besides, there is some brutality in Romeo’s “move not while my prayer’s effect I take” (1.4.219), it confirms the idea of physical attraction and connection between the Greek and Trojan archetypical heroes, to the point where they indeed merge and become one. Fascinatingly, it is just their opposition that makes Achilles and Hector so similar. Their separation (the aggression between them that culminates in Hector’s death) and their unity (the attraction between them that culminates in an only partly symbolic sexual act, the penetration of Hector’s body) coincide, and this is not marked as a contradiction here.

Confirming once more the idea that Hector symbolizes Troy, Achilles, still using Hector’s metre and rhyme, addresses the dying Hector as “Ilium” and “Troy” (“So, Ilium, fall thou! Now, Troy, sink down!”, Troilus and Cressida 5.9.11). Thus the performance also sets the course for the future: Not only the past, or history, are performatively created, but the future, Troy’s downfall, as well, as it is contained in this scene like in a nutshell, ready to become a reality soon.

The binary pairs Hector–Achilles, Troy–Greece, medieval–early modern, or premodern–modern, however, merge to become a unity. The lines of division that marked off the dichotomic opposites vanish and leave them as inseparable, showing that they are ultimately one and the same, and that the Other really is a part of the Self and that its separation doesn’t make it go away. This particular scene with Hector and Achilles shows above all the destructiveness of locating unwanted parts of the Self elsewhere—for both parties, as Hector’s death of course also sets the clock ticking for Achilles, who, as we all know, doesn’t outlive Hector for long.