Ambiguity is the New Tragedy: Troilus and Cressida Mini-Paper

Unfortunately, I didn't get any responses on Facebook about my thesis. Too bad! I guess I'll have to make it more accessible or go elsewhere for feedback. However, I was able to ask my roommate about what she thought about tragedy in general. Since I am doing something of a genre study, I wanted to get a feel for what people generally think of tragedies. I also have been looking up pictures of tragedies to see what the general "feel" of a tragedy is. I've found that the pictures always are very dramatic and full of exaggerated motions. They often focus on two lovers facing each other or being torn apart, or people alone with anguished faces. These pictures really set the tone for how I think people perceive tragedy. Although I didn't go as much into this perception within my mini-essay, I certainly have plans of implementing this perception and how it works specifically with Troilus and Cressida as I work on future drafts.

I focused a lot on Aristotle's Poetics because I thought it was really important to tie in a Greek source with Troilus and Cressida, especially since the play has very Greek roots. If the play goes against the conventions of the Greek tragedy, it gives more of a deliberate nature to the break, which is important.

I'm going to post a link to this on my Google+. Maybe I'll get a better response on there? At least I hope!

I know I need to incorporate a lot more close analysis and social learning into my paper, but I would appreciate any suggestions as I work through my ideas. Here's my draft:

Is Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida’s a tragedy? This is a fundamental question that critics have been asking for a long time. I decided to take a look at a more general idea of what a tragedy is, especially to the lay audience. My roommate Andrea Kokkonen has been exposed to some Shakespeare plays, but she doesn’t define herself as an expert. When I asked her what she thought a tragedy was, she explained that it is “A play that doesn’t end happily. Usually there are deaths, or many deaths, and even the main character may die.” In general, after talking to her and knowing that people think of tragedy as a “sad” play where characters die or do not get what they want, I decided that Troilus and Cressida can be qualified as a tragedy in this most general sense. This is perhaps why the play is so often categorized as a tragedy, because to the lay audience, it is a tragedy. Troilus doesn’t get Cressida in the end, he doesn’t get his revenge. The Trojans are beaten back, and Hector is killed. There is victory on the side of the Greeks, but they only manage to win by seemingly revengeful and sinister means. All seems dismal by the end of the play—a perfectly good enough example of a “tragedy” for the lay audience. Yet, is it enough that the lay audience believes that Troilus and Cressida is a tragedy in the most general sense? Or will they still believe something is missing?

In my opinion, Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida resists the traditional category of the tragedy, forming an ambiguous and anticlimactic ending. Aristotle’s Poetics is probably one of the most well-known and classical definition of tragedy. Of course, if Troilus and Cressida should be defined as a tragedy, then it should ideally live up to some of Aristotle’s requirements for the tragedy.

First, Aristotle dissects the plot of a traditional tragedy: “Now, according to our definition Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude; for there may be a whole that is wanting in magnitude” (Section VII). In this definition, there is a sense that the action of a tragedy must be whole and of a large magnitude—it demands a grand scheme of things. Troilus and Cressida is certainly set up on a large scale—it takes place during the Trojan War, which automatically sets up the scene on a grand scale. However, there are so many elements of the play—the lustful and short-lived nature of Troilus and Cressida’s love, the anti-climatic fight between Ajax and Hector, and the sneaking nature of Hector’s murder—that seem so anticlimactic, so resistant of the magnitude that Aristotle calls for. Troilus and Cressida resists that magnitude, simply because all of the moments that should be amplified are actually reduced to moments of weakness or anticlimax.

If Troilus and Cressida cannot be called a play of magnitude, can it qualify as a play that is whole? Aristotle says, “A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end . . . A well constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but conform to these principles.” So does Troilus and Cressida begin or end haphazardly? It might begin innocently enough, with Troilus declaring his love for Cressida—there isn’t much haphazardness about that. However, it certainly seems to end in chaos. Troilus claims, “No space of earth shall sunder our two hates: / I'll haunt thee like a wicked conscience still, / That mouldeth goblins swift as frenzy's thoughts. / Strike a free march to Troy! with comfort go: / Hope of revenge shall hide our inward woe.” Troilus does not receive the revenge he was looking for, and the play ends without hope and without total resignation to despair—it ends without satisfying, ends without having an end.

Yet another demand of the tragedy is that it is “an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear or pity. Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follows as cause and effect” (Aristotle IX). Of course, there can be nothing as pitiful as Troilus overhearing his Cressida succumb to Diomedes’s advances. But is this pity enough? No, Aristotle demands more: “The tragic wonder will then be greater than if they happened of themselves or by accident; for even coincidences are most striking when they have an air of design . . . Such events seem not to be due to mere chance. Plots, therefore, constructed on these principles are necessarily the best” (Aristotle IX). Perhaps some of the events in Troilus and Cressida are tragic, but do they always have an air of design? When Ajax and Hector fight, but end up at a draw, the play has been leading up to this fight thus far. There is a certain element of “chance” and unexpectedness, not only in this ending to the fight, but throughout the play.

Does Shakespeare fail then, in creating a successful play? If he has mostly failed in meeting Aristotle’s requirements, it very well seems like his play should be considered unsuccessful, at least by Aristotlian standards. And since Troilus and Cressida focuses so concretely upon its Greek and Trojan roots, it seems only natural that it would also focus on the Greek play forms, especially the tragedy. What is Shakespeare trying to accomplish by breaking from Greek tragedy conventions? Perhaps, as Oates puts it, “Troilus and Cressida, that most vexing and ambiguous of Shakespeare's plays, strikes the modern reader as a contemporary document—its investigation of numerous infidelities, its criticism of tragic pretensions, above all, its implicit debate between what is essential in human life and what is only existential are themes of the twentieth century. ... This is tragedy of a special sort—the ‘tragedy’ the basis of which is the impossibility of conventional tragedy.” And it certainly seems as if the traditional audience of the play has trouble with the play. One reader on goodreads.com explained, "I never thought I'd find a Shakespearean work mediocre but here it is."

Is there something even more tragic than the traditional tragedy itself as characters are consistently shown as less heroic, noble, and in general just less tragic than a traditional tragedy demands characters to be? Perhaps Shakespeare is pushing past traditional tragedy to free the play from traditional convention and let the reader determine how to view the play, thus critiquing the limited scope of the tragic genre.

Works Cited

Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by S. H. Butcher. Retrieved from http://libertyonline.hypermall.com/Aristotle/Poetics.html

Goodreads. Post by Pippi Bluestocking. Retrieved from http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/187518.Troilus_and_Cressida

Oates, Joyce. “The Tragedy of Existence: Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida.” Originally published as two separate essays, in Philological Quarterly, Spring 1967, and Shakespeare Quarterly, Spring 1966.