"As True as Troilus," "As False as Cressid": Tradition, Text, and the Implicated Reader
"AS TRUE AS TROILUS," "AS FALSE AS CRESSID" : TRADITION, TEXT, AND THE IMPLICATED READER PAUL G A U D E T University of Western Ontario And generally let every student of nature take this as a rule, that what ever his mind seizes upon with peculiar satisfaction is to be held in...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
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| Published: |
University of Alberta
1990
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| In: |
English studies in Canada
Year: 1990, Volume: 16, Issue: 2, Pages: 125-148 |
| Further subjects: | B
Girard, René (1923-2015)
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Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
MARC
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| 520 | |a "AS TRUE AS TROILUS," "AS FALSE AS CRESSID" : TRADITION, TEXT, AND THE IMPLICATED READER PAUL G A U D E T University of Western Ontario And generally let every student of nature take this as a rule, that what ever his mind seizes upon with peculiar satisfaction is to be held in sus picion. . . . (Bacon, "Aphorism LVIII" ) A .t the approximate centre of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida is a symbolic moment in which three characters anticipate their legendary defi nitions. The swearing of oaths (m.ii) can be seen as a ritualized moment, a focal point that activates typological characterization. It elevates and au thenticates the audience’s collective consciousness and mythic inheritances.1 The epithets voiced by Troilus and Cressida — that in future all "True swains" shall be named "As true as Troilus" and all false maids "As false as Cressid" — confirm their identities within a patriarchal dialectic that opposes masculine truth to feminine duplicity. To make sense of this mo ment in traditional terms, however, is to confront a crucial paradox and self-contradiction within both the play and its critical reception. On one hand, critics cite a technique of "reiterated reductions to nonsense" (Colie 333) and regard the play as breaking all expectations — literary, linguistic, generic, theatrical, political, philosophical (the list could go on). Simulta neously, they contradict themselves by exempting the oath-swearing from the play’s general destabilization. Why should this dramatic moment be the only one to valorize received ideas and confirm audience expectations? This curious exemption elides the sexual politics of orthodox criticism while at the same time exposing them. It also suppresses the role of trans ference in interpretation by objectifying the reader/spectator as a passive and neutral recipient. By seeing Cressida as conforming type, Shakespeare’s audience could (and still can) retain confidence in the legitimacy and relia bility of tradition and, by extension, in the demonstrable rightness of their own habitual perceptions and judgments. Thus, while the play seems over whelming in its attack on tradition, it paradoxically allows its audience a self-protective strategy of containment based on those aspects of tradition that are predicated on feminine depravity. However, to read Cressida as a symbol of infidelity, to blame her in order to counter the subversive threat of the play’s nihilism, is an act of masculine scapegoating. In short, it is English Stud ies in Ca n a d a , x v i, 2, June 1990 masculinist ideology — within the play and in the critical re-production of its meaning — that persistently stabilizes textual meaning by reifying, fixing Cressida. To accept the objectification of Cressida as faithless whore is to enter into a complicit and usually unacknowledged relationship with the constructed fictions of male presence in the play. Troilus, Pandarus, Ulysses, Thersites , Diomedes, all judge; and each assumes the singular rightness of his way of viewing, his vision — untroubled, declarative, reductive, and of ten self-righteous. There is no questioning of methods, or motives, or the positioning of judgments. A more self-scrutinizing reading practice would determine meaning differently. It would focus on a doubleness in Cressida that masculine judgment denies — she is both constructed object and in terrogative (and interrogating) subject. It would stress the alterability of a playscript and the sensory dimensions, textually undefined, by which each performance constitutes its meaning. In speculating on the textualization of Cressida within the play and in critical discourse, it might observe that any (re)interpretation, (re)animation of Cressida can serve as a self-reflexive metaphor for (re)interpreting the play/text. Finally, it would have to take into account the ideological displacements of feminism.2 Although my impulse in proposing a divergent reading practice is to resist the customary reduction of Cressida to a convenient misogynist epithet, I cannot escape my inscription in the play as male spectator, my implication in several forms of voyeurism. As a man, I am implicated in misogynist reading practices and the pornographic potential of the male gaze; as a reader of Troilus and Cressida, I am implicated in the sexual and political positions of male spectators within the play; as a spectator in the theatre, I am placed in another... | ||
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