A choice of pandars

 

Saint-Maure de Touraine

John Dryden's Troilus and Cressida: or, Truth Found Too Late (1679) wasn't a very successful effort at improving Shakespeare, in Sir Walter Scott's view. He took particular exception to Dryden's Pandarus.

Mr Godwin has justly remarked, that the delicacy of Chaucer's ancient tale has suffered even in the hands of Shakespeare; but in those of Dryden it has undergone a far deeper deterioration. Whatever is coarse and naked in Shakespeare, has been dilated into ribaldry by the poet laureat of Charles the second; and the character of Pandarus, in particular, is so grossly heightened, as to disgrace even the obliging class to whom that unfortunate procurer has bequeathed his name.

From this you'll gather that Dryden's Pandarus is worth sampling. Here he is, creepily commending his niece to Troilus:  

Pandarus. I measured her with my girdle yesterday; she's not half a yard about the waist, but so taper a shape did I never see; but when I had her in my arms, Lord, thought I,—and by my troth I could not forbear sighing,—If prince Troilus had her at this advantage and I were holding of the door!—An she were a thought taller,—but as she is, she wants not an inch of Helen neither; but there's no more comparison between the women—there was wit, there was a sweet tongue! How her words melted in her mouth! Mercury would have been glad to have such a tongue in his mouth, I warrant him. I would somebody had heard her talk yesterday, as I did.

(Dryden's Troilus and Cressida, I.2)

[Pandarus.] . . . but if you had seen him, when I said to him,—Take a good heart, man, and follow me; and fear no colours, and speak your mind, man: she can never stand you; she will fall, an' 'twere a leaf in autumn,—

Cressida. Did you tell him all this, without my consent?

Pandarus. Why you did consent, your eyes consented; they blabbed, they leered, their very corners blabbed. But you'll say, your tongue said nothing. No, I warrant it: your tongue was wiser; your tongue was better bred; your tongue kept its own counsel: nay, I'll say that for you, your tongue said nothing.—Well, such a shamefaced couple did I never see, days o'my life! so 'fraid of one another; such ado to bring you to the business! . . .

. . .

Pandarus. There's all my fear, that thou art not frail: thou should'st be frail, all flesh is frail.

Cressida. Are you my uncle, and can give this counsel to your own brother's daughter?

Pandarus. If thou wert my own daughter a thousand times over, I could do no better for thee; what wouldst thou have, girl? he's a prince, and a young prince and a loving young prince! an uncle, dost thou call me? by Cupid, I am a father to thee; get thee in, get thee in, girl, I hear him coming. And do you hear, niece! I give you leave to deny a little, 'twill be decent; but take heed of obstinacy, that's a vice; no obstinacy, my dear niece.

(Dryden's Troilus and Cressida, II.2)

Yes, Dryden's Pandarus is nauseating and all too credible -- that perhaps is what really offended Scott. But as Godwin said, Shakespeare's Pandarus is well down this road.  Here he is, trying to warm up the pair that he has finally brought together: 

[Pandarus.] Come your ways, come your ways; an you draw backward,

we'll put you i' the fills. Why do you not speak to

her? Come, draw this curtain, and let's see your

picture. Alas the day, how loath you are to offend

daylight! an 'twere dark, you'ld close sooner.

So, so; rub on, and kiss the mistress. How now!

a kiss in fee-farm! build there, carpenter; the air

is sweet. Nay, you shall fight your hearts out ere

I part you. . . .

(Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, III.2)

And here he is being jolly the following morning: 

Troilus. It is your uncle.

Cressida. A pestilence on him! now will he be mocking:

I shall have such a life!

Enter Pandarus

Pandarus. How now, how now! how go maidenheads? Here, you

maid! where's my cousin Cressid?

Cressida. Go hang yourself, you naughty mocking uncle!

You bring me to do, and then you flout me too.

Pandarus. To do what? to do what? let her say

what: what have I brought you to do?

Cressida.  Come, come, beshrew your heart! you'll ne'er be good,

Nor suffer others.

Pandarus.  Ha! ha! Alas, poor wretch! ah, poor capocchia!

hast not slept to-night? would he not, a naughty

man, let it sleep? a bugbear take him!

Cressida. Did not I tell you? Would he were knock'd i' the head!

Knocking within

Who's that at door? good uncle, go and see.

My lord, come you again into my chamber:

You smile and mock me, as if I meant naughtily.

Troilus. Ha, ha!

Cressida. Come, you are deceived, I think of no such thing.

Knocking within

How earnestly they knock! Pray you, come in:

I would not for half Troy have you seen here.

(Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, IV.2)

I extended the quotation a little, to include Troilus' raffish "Ha, ha!" and Cressida's mundanely growsing household management. You'd think they'd been husband and wife for twenty years. 

Dryden was attempting to rework this most cynical of plays into something a bit less transgressive, a bit more classical. Probably he placed greater emphasis on Pandarus' manipulations because social prostitution was just the kind of topic that preoccupied the theatre of his time, but it may also have been because he wanted to redeem Cressida. In his version, Cressida only feigns yielding to Diomedes (a plan to effect her escape): when Troilus refuses to believe her, she stabs herself. (This tragically loyal Cressida reappeared in Dyneley Hussey's libretto for William Walton's 1954 opera.) For the rest, Dryden worked hard to restore a semblance of nobility to the Greek and Trojan heroes. Hector and Andromache are touchingly painted. Troilus and Hector quarrel magnificently over the return of Cressida (yes, it's another remake of that Brutus and Cassius scene). Dryden even saw an opportunity to commend submission to royal authority, in the unlikely forms of Agamemnon and Priam.

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Dryden saw Shakespeare's play as crying out for "mending". In his time it was axiomatic that all Shakespeare's plots were defective. As for this particular play, it had some fine things, but was not well developed. It was "in all probability one of his first endeavours on the stage". 

For the play itself, the author seems to have begun it with some fire; the characters of Pandarus and Thersites, are promising enough; but as if he grew weary of his task, after an entrance or two, he lets them fall: and the latter part of the tragedy is nothing but a confusion of drums and trumpets, excursions and alarms. The chief persons, who give name to the tragedy, are left alive; Cressida is false, and is not punished. Yet, after all, because the play was Shakespeare's, and that there appeared in some places of it the admirable genius of the author, I undertook to remove that heap of rubbish under which many excellent thoughts lay wholly buried.

(from Dryden's Preface to his Troilus and Cressida)

Actually, as Scott complained, Dryden threw away some of the best parts along with the rubbish. But I do have a lot of sympathy with Dryden's view of Shakespeare's problematic play. The idea that Shakespeare's heart wasn't really in it can still be seen in W.W. Lawrence (1942), who wondered if Shakespeare did his best with an unappealing assignment, e.g to re-tell a hackneyed love story, or maybe to essay a fashionable cynicism he found uncongenial. 

As for "one of his first endeavours on the stage" -- well, Dryden was writing before anyone had begun to work out the chronology of Shakespeare's plays. Troilus and Cressida [from now on this means Shakespeare's play, not Dryden's] is generally agreed to come from about 1601-1602. (Perhaps just after Hamlet and just before Othello, two of Shakespeare's most amazing plays; no wonder we're bothered by it.) The frequently clotted language ("tortive and errant") confirms that date, but Troilus and Cressida is stylistically very various, and sometimes it oddly recalls Shakespeare's earliest comedies. Naïve dramatic situations like this:

Ajax. I do hate a proud man, as I hate the engendering of toads.

Nestor (aside). Yet he loves himself: is't not strange?

Or repartee that wouldn't look out of place in Two Gentlemen of Verona:

Music within

[Pandarus.] What music is this?

Servant. I do but partly know, sir: it is music in parts.

Pandarus. Know you the musicians?

Servant. Wholly, sir.

Pandarus. Who play they to?

Servant. To the hearers, sir.

Pandarus. At whose pleasure, friend

Servant. At mine, sir, and theirs that love music.

Pandarus. Command, I mean, friend.

Servant. Who shall I command, sir?

Pandarus. Friend, we understand not one another: I am too courtly and thou art too cunning.

Or what about this clumping commentary on Diomedes and Aeneas? 

Paris. This is the most despiteful gentle greeting,

The noblest hateful love, that e'er I heard of --

The "never-writer" of the 1609 Prologue puffs the play, telling us that its witty author wrote "none more witty than this" --, yet long stretches of Troilus and Cressida are characterized by a strangely rudimentary kind of wit. Ajax and Achilles are so dense that they'd be impervious to anything more ambitious. Thersites shows a quick wit now and then, but mostly he's just hurling insults. Nor do the wiser Greeks impress us greatly. Nestor seems to inertly rehash whatever he has just been told, always a step behind; the line above is almost his only effort at originality. 

Ulysses' idea of having the generals troop past Achilles while affecting to ignore him is broad comedy at best -- about the level of It Ain't Half Hot, Mum. I have difficulty imagining a discerning member of Shakespeare's audience (a prince Hamlet, say) being particularly impressed by this. It sets up, of course, the more elevated discussion between Ulysses and Achilles, yet the scene (III.3) then fizzles into Thersites doing impressions of the taciturn Ajax, and as Achilles leaves the stage we return to theatrical primitivism:

Achilles. My mind is troubled, like a fountain stirr'd;

And I myself see not the bottom of it.

(Exeunt Achilles and Patroclus)

Disappointing our expectations is commonly recognized as a recurrent feature of the play's progress. But, after all, that renders the play problematic, not just its characters and action. 

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Like all Shakespeare's plays, Troilus and Cressida has been enormously discussed. In this case the volume of debate is partly down to admiration and partly down to perceived difficulties. 

As it happens, much of this discussion is well captured in two recent PhD theses that I've found entertaining and informative:

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Johann Gregory describes accumulated scholarship and commentary about the cultural debate within Troilus and Cressida, its contemporary context, and especially its probing of expectation, audience, taste and social distinction (with Pierre Bourdieu in mind) :

Johann Gregory, Troilus and Cressida: audience expectation and matters of taste in relation to authorship and the book (University of Cardiff, 2013)

http://orca.cf.ac.uk/53952/

Troilus and Cressida is often considered one of Shakespeare's most literary plays, like Love's Labour's Lost i.e. less concerned with telling a good story and more concerned with contemporary cultural debate.  One background is "The Poet's War", in which Troilus and Cressida may intervene (an intervention possibly responded to by Ben Jonson in the "Apologetical Dialogue" that he appended to Poetaster). A more shadowy background is the numerous other Troy plays, especially the group composed for the Admiral's Men around 1599 by Thomas Dekker and Henry Chettle, unfortunately all lost. One thing that survives is a fragmentary backstage plot for their Troilus and Cressida. This was a document for prompters and call-boys, listing the characters in each scene, their entrances and exits, alarums, etc. You can see it here: 

https://lostplays.folger.edu/Troilus_and_Cressida

It shows that Shakespeare's play followed basically the same approach as Dekker/Chettle in treating the story of Troilus and Cressida alongside the story of the war's progress (the central Homeric Hector/Achilles thread, presented as scenes of council debate and fighting). Both are large-cast plays portraying the numerous worthies who were at the siege of Troy. A reference to Cressida entering "wth Beggars" suggests that Dekker and Chettle included Cressida's tragic end as envisaged by Henryson in The Testament of Cresseid. In another scene Ajax enters carrying Patroclus on his back (presumably, the dead Patroclus); so it seems likely that Dekker and Chettle's Ajax was an unexceptionable hero. The name Thersites is conspicuously absent (though the plot is fragmentary and only covers about half the play). For what it's worth, these observations are consistent with the presumption that a Troy play by Dekker and Chettle would probably be respectful and romantic, exactly what Shakespeare's play isn't. 

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Joanne Elizabeth Brown tells a complementary story, about the history of interpretation of the characters in Troilus and Cressida: in literary criticism, in performance and among theatre reviewers. The play had essentially no performance tradition prior to the early twentieth century, but since then it's made up for lost time. Its fitful, gappy approach to narrative has permitted widely divergent interpretations of its characters: Cressida as a game-playing tease/a mature woman/heartbroken by Troilus/a victim of war, Troilus as a youthful idealist/a self-absorbed adolescent/a roué, Ulysses as a wise authority/a clever schemer only out for himself/a pompous self-appointed expert who usually gets it wrong, Hector the essence of nobility and chivalry/just as flawed as everyone else, Helen as shallow socialite or traumatized booty. Then there are subtler questions of emphasis for a producer: should the Trojans be favourably contrasted with the Greeks; should Thersites' physical deformity be highlighted; should Achilles and Patroclus be presented chiefly as a pair of lolling slobs, or is their sexual relationship important; and what motivates Pandarus, should he be shown as sexually excited by Troilus, or by Cressida? 

Joanne Elizabeth Brown, Reinterpreting Troilus and Cressida: changing perceptions in literary criticism and British performance (University of Birmingham, 2016)

https://etheses.bham.ac.uk/id/eprint/7359/1/Brown17PhD.pdf

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Like, or find fault . . .

The Prologue of Troilus and Cressida is unnervingly reminiscent of the Chorus of Henry V, especially Act III. Here's another tale of a ship-born invasion. But the patriotic spirit of the earlier play has evaporated. If the invading Greeks have a kind of case, this armed Prologue presents it with a studied coldness. He does not identify with either side, only with the state of human beings in warfare. 

We've come long way from Dryden's view of Troilus and Cressida; David Bevington, the latest Arden editor, calls it "an amazing play". I truly wish I shared his enthusiasm. 

My central difficulty, I think, is the distanced way in which it tells its story. Though much of the play seems to be occupied with actions that are trivial and go nowhere in particular, it does after all have a story. Take that central event, Cressida's abandonment of Troilus and moving on to Diomede. You might assume that a certain perplexity would precede this momentous development. Compare Measure for Measure: Angelo gives us two perplexed soliloquies before he makes his infamous proposal, and Isabella has one straight afterwards, in which we see her perplexity. Cressida's soliloquies, in contrast, express no perplexity; they tell us what she has already decided or done (I.2, V.2 -- both are in rhymed verse). Nor are we shown anything of Diomede's presumed wooing (Chaucer had done it brilliantly). You could say that Shakespeare cuts straight from Cressida's anguished parting with Troilus to Diomedes impatiently pressing for fulfilment of what, he claims, she has already committed to. In between comes the kissing scene with the Greek leaders; it feels relevant in a symbolic way, but again we are given no real access to Cressida's thoughts, only the external judgements of Ulysses. It can be played in radically different ways. 

Here's her post-betrayal soliloquy:

Troilus, farewell! one eye yet looks on thee

But with my heart the other eye doth see.

Ah, poor our sex! this fault in us I find,

The error of our eye directs our mind:

What error leads must err; O, then conclude

Minds sway'd by eyes are full of turpitude.

Cressida tells us only that her eye has betrayed her. Nothing about the war or her difficult circumstances or her need of a protector, just her erring eye. As if, basically, she just fancied a bit of Diomedes. 

But this rhymed soliloquy has an emblematic quality, as if Cressida is talking more about herself as a pattern of female frailty than about her specific circumstances. It's the same as in the earlier scene where she describes the hypothetical proverb "as false as Cressid" in response to "as true as Troilus". Not, for example, a hypothetical "as constant as Cressid".  It seems her character has stepped out of narrative time and holds up a signboard. Elsewhere Cressida's emotions and hesitations can be witnessed (e.g. in the parting scene, and in the yes-no-yes of the eavesdropping scene) but Troilus and Cressida goes beyond Hamlet in its scepticism about whether people can be known, even by themselves. And a scepticism about whether people can be known easily slides into a cynicism about what people say. Cressida's final communication in the play isn't even heard by us: Troilus dismisses it as "words, words, mere words" (V.3). 

I can appreciate there's a certain thrill in seeing verbal performance disengaged from revelation of character. It's a drama of cubist scintillations; no other Shakespeare play switches modes so incessantly. The buffoon Ajax can suddenly become the courtly Ajax of later scenes; the dim Achilles can suddenly talk philosophy with Ulysses; Troilus himself can switch from fervent lover to unsentimental pragmatist (as Cressida predicted) and then back to outraged idealist again. Pandarus can transform from a starstruck courtier into a pox-ridden bawd. Ulysses can be anything Shakespeare requires him for. Even Nestor can step up when the author requires a three-man chorus to describe what's going on in the battle (V.5). 

But the feeling that Shakespeare's not really that inspired by the story, that his eye is roaming over the mass of material and fitfully developing small ideas while tossing away the big ones ... I find that feeling hard to resist. 

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Troilus. Patience herself, what goddess e'er she be,

Doth lesser blench at sufferance than I do. 

(Act I Scene 1)

This is a bit confusing. 

In the context of the scene, and in a general way, we understand Troilus as meaning that he's been more patient than Patience herself. Maybe we hear the comic overtones of a Basil Fawlty or Edmund Blackadder or some other typically impatient comic character, exploding "it would try the patience of a saint!"

But what he actually says tends to imply that he's less patient than Patience herself. 

Perhaps he's trying to say that Patience has never had to suffer as much waiting around as he has. 

But then he also wants to introduce the image of turning pale with frustration. 

And so he ends up saying that Patience does not turn pale as often as he does, which can have two different explanations: 1. she does not have so much occasion; she is not tried as much as Troilus is. 2. she is, in fact, patient; and Troilus isn't. 

Has Troilus in fact been patient, shy, an ideal courtly lover? Or is he comically ignorant of himself, totally impatient and self-centred, someone whose perception of his own long-suffering cannot be taken seriously? 

Saint-Maure de Touraine

Saint-Maure de Touraine may be the birthplace of  Benoît de Sainte-Maure, author of Le Roman de Troie (c. 1155-1160), in which the story of Troilus and Briseida [=Cressida] appears for the first time. 

These notes on Shakespeare: full list