Love, history and emotion in Chaucer and Shakespeare: Troilus and Criseyde and Troilus and Cressida

Introduction: performing the politics of

passion: Troilus and Criseyde and Troilus and

Cressida and the literary tradition of love

and history

Andrew James Johnston and Russell West-Pavlov

For the last three decades or so, literary studies, especially those dealing with premodern texts, have been dominated by the New Historicist paradigm. Texts have generally been seen to exist in a dialogic relationship with their contexts, as both deriving from and contributing to a vibrant matrix of contemporary discourses. Ever since the turn of the new millennium dissatisfaction with this state of affairs has been growing – without, however, producing any privileged alternative to the New Historicism. While some voices have been calling for a new formalism and others have been promoting a return to humanism, it seems obvious that the issue of historicism and its implications will remain one of the fundamental challenges to present-day criticism.

This is where this collection of essays seeks to intervene. The editors of this volume hold that the New Historicism’s tendency to let a text ‘rest easy within a contemporaneous sign system’¹ – that is, to embed a text in a purely synchronous context – helps to obscure a variety of aspects which fundamentally constitute the nature of the historical text and the range of meaning(s) it is capable of generating.

On the one hand, the New Historicism’s insistence on a discursive synchronicity threatens to efface the extent to which texts themselves interrogate their own moment in history. After all, texts from the past may well be capable of seeing themselves as belonging to a textual tradition or a specifically intertextual dialogue that both bridges and questions the boundaries of a text’s specific moment in history. In so doing, a text may actually begin to cast doubt on those very period boundaries that have contributed to consolidating its position in literary history in the first place. For all their conspicuous attention to history, New Historicist critics have, by and large, been content with leaving intact the established period boundaries we have inherited from the nineteenth century. In some cases, the perspective from which histories were written was questioned, as was the access to discursive power, but the fundamental sequentiality of history, and the segmentation upon which that sequentiality depended (that is, periodization), remained largely untouched. On the other hand, the New Historicism, by eschewing what it perceived as an outmoded focus upon time, turning instead towards synchronicity, contextuality and spatiality, unwittingly left intact the very temporal logic it scornfully dismissed.² Though this is paradoxical, it should not come as a complete surprise: if one conceives of a text as floating in a specific synchronic system of discourses then the fact that a text may seek to disrupt that very sense of synchronicity will easily be neglected.

There have been a number of recent attempts to rethink the various logics assumed by the nineteenth-century historicism which even putatively radical undertakings such as the New Historicism have failed to address or question. One recent initiative has been alternative history or counterfactual history. Counterfactuals imagine multiple alternative outcomes to the courses of history that we know. By inventing plausible deviations from documented history, but couching them in the factualist idiom of modern historical writing, such hypothetical historiography brings back into view a fundamental fallacy within historical commonsense: namely, the assumption that, because history happened as it did, it had to happen that way. In other words, the contingency of historical causality, which from the retrospective viewpoint of the present congeals into a sort determinism, is pushed back into the foreground. It is no chance that many counterfactuals are in fact a sort of metahistoriographic fiction.³ They are a type of fiction which possesses the capacity to lay bare as contingency what we take to be pre-determined causality. Such fiction questions not merely the status of individual historical events as ‘factual’ but the entire course of history as a ‘fact’ which has only retrospectively gained that aura of objective neutrality. Conversely, however, it is precisely the fictive tenor of counterfactuals which defuses their potential to disturb the certitudes of historiographical thought. To the extent that they deviate from historical fact, thereby participating in the realm of fiction, they almost automatically disqualify themselves as serious interventions into the business of historiographical reflection. Counterfactuals ultimately capitulate to the regime of historical realism.

Postcolonial scholars, too, have been critical of Western concepts of periodization and of the general urge to periodize. Dipesh Chakrabarty, for instance, has drawn attention to the ways in which historicism has tended to reinforce the notion of clear developmental stages in history, a notion inevitably relegating non-Western societies to a status of immaturity, to an eternal ‘not yet’ in comparison with the supposedly superior Western societies. Thus he argues: ‘Historicism thus posited historical time as a measure of a cultural distance … that was assumed to exist between the West and the non-West.’⁴ Chakrabarty’s observation did not, however, prevent many postcolonial critics themselves from remaining inattentive to issues of periodization and temporality. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has pointed out, much postcolonial criticism and theory has ‘neglected the study of the distant past, positing instead of interrogating the anteriority against which modern regimes of power have supposedly arisen’.⁵ In many respects, the postcolonial project has primarily conceived of itself as a result of modernity concerned exclusively with problems deriving from modernity.⁶

The sociology of science, too, has provided important critiques of Western regimes of periodization. Bruno Latour chastises progressivist historians of modern science for relying uncritically upon the principle of radical periodization – a principle that forms the very foundation on which the idea of modernity rests. Modernity posits temporality as a linear and unidirectional progress highlighted but never actually reversed by a succession of more or less violent ruptures, such as revolutions and spectacular historic events resulting in radical breaks with the past:

The moderns have a peculiar propensity for understanding time that passes as if it really were abolishing the past behind it. They all take themselves for Attila, in whose footsteps no grass grows back. They do not feel that they are removed from the Middle Ages by a certain number of centuries, but that they are separated by Copernican revolutions, epistemological breaks, epistemic ruptures so radical that nothing of the past ought to survive in them.⁷

A more concerted attack on the monolith of historiographical common sense can be found in the recent development known as queer history. Though the contributions in this volume may not explicitly align themselves with the approach of queer history, its agenda is useful for refracting some of the theoretical assumptions which frame the readings presented here. Even as these contributions endorse a variety of different theoretical frameworks, the fundamental theoretical challenges that they respond to closely resemble those that set in motion the evolution of queer history. Like much contemporary theory, queer history suggests that scholarly neutrality and objectivity is more rhetorical façade than genuine fact, and that historical scholarship should lay bare the politically motivated agendas which underpin its particular version of intellectual procedure. This may not appear, at first glance, to be a particularly remarkable assumption, but it drives a number of more unsettling assertions.

Queer history posits, first, that the past, like anything else, can be the object of strong affective valencies, indeed, that affect is what governs our relationship to the past. The relationship of present to past(s) evinced in ‘a queer desire for history’⁸ is corporeal, visceral, desire-laden. The historiographical relationship would thus be laced with such affects as passion, haptic possessiveness, curiosity, compassion, envy, avarice, aggression, violence and the desire to deface. Troilus and Cressida, Troilus and Criseyde and their avatars (Henryson’s version, etc.), are exemplary in this respect because they lay bare the centrality of affect within history and historiography. Upon the back of the primary love story between Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida all the other affect-driven relationships and causalities in the narrative are thrown into stark contrast. Not only this, affect proves to be the main element which drives readings of those affects – in the first instance by the artists themselves, as Chaucer reads the post-Homeric Trojan tradition from Dares Phrygius and Dictys Cretensis through Benoît de Sainte-Maure and Guido delle Colonne down to Boccaccio, as Lydgate reads both the post-Homeric tradition and Chaucer, as Henryson reads the post-Homeric tradition, Chaucer and Lydgate and as Shakespeare rereads Homer, Chaucer, Lydgate and Henryson, and so on; and then by the critics, who by and large have shared the overwhelmingly masculinist standpoint of Chaucer’s Troilus and Pandarus or of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Ulysses themselves, thereby also generating affect-driven readings dislodged only in the past half-century by feminist readings propelled, in turn, by a different complex of affects.

We are confronted here by a typical instantiation of what Freud called Nachträglichkeit, for which James Wood has recently offered a neat translation, ‘afterwardness’.⁹ ‘Secondary revision’ overlays, retroactively, previous versions of a psychic state which becomes buried under successive layers of renarration until the putative ‘original’ state becomes inaccessible – to the extent that the very notion of ‘originality’ begins to lose its meaning. In the case of the Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida narratives, each reading of affect, driven itself by a new configuration of affect, rereads and rewrites, often reinscribing in a structure ever more powerful in its authority, earlier accounts of affect. Such a process moves forwards from reading to reading, while in fact always working backwards to effect ever-new revisions of the archive upon which it depends.

This means, secondly, that the causal relationship of sequential order which nineteenth-century historicism imposed upon time, and whose measure was that of various scales of periodization, is fundamentally disturbed in its logic. This is an altogether more radical notion than the mere assertion of political tendentiousness or individual and/or collective affect as a factor in scholarly readings of the past and its texts. Forward movement through textual history is generated by a constant backwards gaze and a reworking of accounts of the past. The irreversible sequentiality of past and present, deemed to be the only residue of classic physics left intact by relativity, is radically questioned by queer history. Just as relativity posited the mutability of time under the effect of gravitational forces, for instance, so too queer history suggests that the pull of affect can upset classical models of historical causality. From this standpoint sequential ordering appears as a mode of disciplining temporality – indeed, nineteenth-century French historians were enjoined by their disciplinary masters at the Sorbonne not to deviate from sequential historiography.¹⁰ Queer history, by contrast, allows for temporal relationships which work against the flow of time, constantly recreating the past that they assemble out of the detritus of archival and material cultures piling up behind them. Queer historiography is non-linear, running in different directions at once, both backwards and forwards, and is driven by affect. Taking such revisionism to its logical extreme, Žižek hyperbolically concludes from a reading of Richard II that the play’s action ‘proves beyond any doubt that Shakespeare had read Lacan’.¹¹ In the context of the present volume, one might similarly quip that Troilus and Cressida demonstrates Shakespeare’s assiduous study of René Girard’s theory of imitative desire.¹² Queer literary history confirms what literary studies in general has always known: namely, that literary texts, attached to their own intertextual precursors by powerful affective valencies, unceasingly strive to rewrite their own textual pasts.

Thirdly then, if ‘a challenge to chronology is also a challenge to periodicity’,¹³ queer history questions that other disciplinary measure, evinced in Jameson’s more recent injunction, ‘we cannot not periodize’.¹⁴ Yet periods are notoriously fluid and their labels polysemic. ‘Long centuries’ in cultural and literary history make a mockery of the segmentation they repose upon. Terms such as the modern, modernity, modernism, and modernization have multiple overlapping and conflicting denotations exacerbated by their various disciplinary affiliations, for example literary high modernism versus architectural international modernism, not to mention the via moderna of medieval nominalist philosophy. The very term ‘modern’ is, after all, a medieval coinage that did not exist in classical Latin. Central to the project of queer (literary) history, one in which (literary) texts would themselves participate, would be not only the contravention of forward-moving sequentiality but also of the periodizations which calibrate and regulate such sequentiality. Indeed, affect, that dynamic which connects and reconnects bodies, territorializes and reterritorializes entities, would by definition transgress the very boundaries that periodizations so spuriously seek to erect. Periods are ways of keeping historical moments apart from each other, just as the past, in depoliticizing modes of historicism, must be kept apart from the present. Queer affect joins the present to the past, in a manner already described by Walter Benjamin, ‘grasp[ing] the constellation which [its] own era has formed with a definite earlier one’, thereby eroding the barriers set up by periods, so as to ‘blast a specific period out of the homogeneous course of history’.¹⁵ If periodization is generally an instrument for defining the present in contradistinction to the past, queer affect would seek unruly connections to the pre- or the proto- which would in turn possess the potential to transform our own moment of historical theorization.

The focus of the current volume, then, is of particular import. For the tradition of Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida is one that both crosses and casts doubt on one of the most significant and ideologically charged borders in literary history, that between the medieval and the early modern. Indeed, the emergence of such borders around the foundational triad ancient/medieval/modern may have been coeval with what has often been described as the emergence of modern historical consciousness itself, indeed, with modernity per se, with periodization and its concomitant fear of anachronism developing on the early modern cusp which our two principal Troilus narratives, Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s, straddle.¹⁶ The medieval/early modern divide is a border that was by and large left untouched both by postmodernism (exemplified by Foucault in the opening chapter of The Order of Things) and by the New Historicism.

The Troilus tradition presents us with a unique case where the Middle Ages battles aesthetically with its classical heritage, just as much as the Renaissance battles with the ancient past it ostensibly endorses and the medieval history against which it seeks to define itself through a stance of intensely felt ambivalence. A specifically medieval tradition of classical material continuing well into the Renaissance, the story of the Trojan prince and his paramour must be considered to be the most spectacular example of a self-consciously literary tradition in English literary history. Indeed, Troilus constitutes a subject matter always already conceived of as a literary tradition that stands in a conflict-ridden relationship to history. And precisely because in the case of Troilus that relationship has, since its very inception, been seen as both troubled and troubling, the story of the unhappy lovers has also been employed to establish a particular relationship between affect, literature and history.

Love in Troy is not simply about a seemingly universal emotion, or, alternatively, about the culturally specific expression of human feelings, but rather a potential response to all attempts at establishing ideologically prescribed links between the literary and the historical, between the history of a love affair and the history of an empire. Emotions in Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida provide the necessary complications which help to preclude any clear and final definition of the role of the aesthetic in time and of its relationship to periodization and to the temporalities of periodization. By claiming a distance from their historical environment and the overarching historical narrative they occur in, the emotions discussed in the Troilus-tradition help to stage a model through which the idea of an aesthetic not directly subject to the pressures of history can be imagined and questioned simultaneously. In the story of Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida history, literature and love – with all the other emotions love encompasses and entails, for example, hope, fear, anger, jealousy, bliss – form a triangle of complex relations in which none is ever wholly commensurate with the others.

This is what this collection of essays sees as its point of departure: the volume posits that the discussion of emotions in Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida constitutes a literary site where the ideological underpinnings of periodization and temporality can be questioned and held in suspense aesthetically. And since the single ideologically most important period boundary in Western culture seems, to this very day, to be the one between the Middle Ages and the early modern period, the volume brings together an international group of scholars from both fields, that is, that devoted to the medieval and that to the early modern, to focus on the vast analytical potential the Troilus-tradition offers for the question of periodization. Central to the project embodied in this volume is the conviction that what empowers the Troilus tradition in this respect is its specific locus in the spaces between – and possibly beyond – the positions conventionally assigned to the medieval and the early modern. In as much as the volume deliberately fosters a dialogue between medievalists and early modernists it joins a rapidly growing impetus in both scholarly communities to destabilize a period boundary so powerful that it has remained untouched by two of the most conspicuously radical movements in the last few decades of literary criticism: postmodernism and the New Historicism.¹⁷

This collection of essays sees itself as a contribution to questioning the established boundaries both between the medieval and the early modern and equally between the political and the aesthetic by focusing intensely on one of English literary history’s most important and most self-conscious textual traditions, that of Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida. By establishing a dialogue between medievalists and early modernists the editors aim, first, to problematize the issue of period boundaries per se. Second, they seek to investigate the ways in which specific relationships between the literary and the historical, on the one hand, and between the literary and the emotions, on the other, help to shape, maintain and critique those very notions of temporality without which periodization could not exist.

Kai Wiegandt’s chapter on hope and fear treats these emotions as metatheatrical operators and, as a consequence, as more general metatemporal moderators. He suggests that hope and fear are central in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida because the two protagonists are aware of the way their reputations are being forged for eternity; by the same token, however, they can only project these emotions into the future on the basis of already extant experiences – in the case of this play, extant textual experiences which go back via Chaucer and beyond. Emotions such as hope and fear thus connect the play’s characters to the future and to the past, thus dissolving any clear distinction between the various temporal phases traversing the play. Affect, according to Wiegandt, precedes and produces historicity. It is affect, in his reading, which anchors the play within a literary historical tradition whose nature by definition resists the facile segmentation afforded by periodization.

Within this very broad framework, a number of authors in this volume focus upon the vicissitudes of various emotions as they are represented within Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s texts. Andreas Mahler suggests that Chaucer plays off against one another the various Renaissance discourses about love, refusing their customary hierarchy and above all refusing their tendency to make exclusive truth claims for themselves at the expense of other discourses. As Mahler sees it, Chaucer marks the moment of the emergence of a specific discourse of love in the fourteenth century. By contrast, according to Mahler, by 1600 love has been exhausted as a serious topic of literary treatment – it degenerates into mere ‘satyrical comedy’. In Mahler’s reading, following the thesis of Troilus and Cressida as an Inns of Court revels play, love is burlesqued – and explored as a series of discursive registers between which the dramatist does not feel impelled to choose. Chaucer begins this process, Shakespeare extends it and takes it to its logical conclusion, namely, a form of discursive inconclusiveness. A single arc of discursive pluralization connects the two texts.

Paul Strohm, surveying the patent lack of privacy in the crowded Londons of Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s times, wonders whether this atmosphere of surveillance, gossip, far from being experienced as a lack, may not have been produced by the early modern conditions of staging, in which everything is on show, and an audience watches actors watching other actors. All this amounts to a fundamental scopic drive at work within the theatre, a form of generalized erotic incitement. Strohm grants a certain minimal difference in crowdedness between Chaucer’s London, whose population was depleted by the plague, and Shakespeare’s whose population doubled within the Bard’s own lifetime, but essentially reads both texts as indulging with the same tension between illusory privacy and general knowledge and surveillance of the open secret of the sexual liaison. The dialectic of privacy and visibility, indexed by Thersites as ‘secretly open’ (5.2.24), is what drives the erotic tension in both works. It is a generalized, social affect which transcends the boundaries of the individual and the couple in both texts, and the boundaries of historical epoch which link rather than separate them.

Other contributions are less optimistic in their readings of affect in these texts. Tracing the genealogies of Hecuba across a number of early modern intertexts, then via Chaucer through to Shakespeare, Hester Lees-Jeffries notes the frequent role of Hecuba as a representative of feminine suffering and as a catalyst for empathetic affective identification. She focuses upon the absence of Hecuba in Troilus and Cressida, an absence which would have been palpable for early modern audiences, right through to the smaller number of female roles to be covered by the boy players in an early modern troupe. She suggests that this absence removes particular textual sites around which collective affects might otherwise have coagulated, thereby disadvantaging Cressida as a character, deprived as she is of earlier modes of affective advocacy. Cressida, like Hecuba, suffers beyond words, but this failure of language is exacerbated in Shakespeare’s play by the occlusion of Hecuba as a character, stripping her even of the audience’s – or later readers’ – affective solidarity.

Russell West-Pavlov’s chapter similarly scrutinizes a transhistorical regime of conflict-ridden affect. The chapter suggests that Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida situates itself within an affective temporality which is explicitly textualized. The past out of which Shakespeare’s play emerges is a past defined by a succession of prior texts, stretching from the Homeric epic to Chaucer’s and Henryson’s versions of the Troilus and Cressida narrative. Shakespeare refashions, or, better, misreads, defaces or disfigures his textual predecessors in order to attack a social structure of self-perpetuating violence which draws its inspiration from notions of chivalric honour encoded in such narratives. Shakespeare’s approach to his predecessors is ‘emulative’, a term used in the early modern period to refer to a form of imitation of superiors which was subversive in tenor; for that imitation sought not merely to honour but also to displace the person imitated and thus upset the social hierarchy. If Shakespeare’s appropriation of Chaucer or others is ‘emulative’ in form, the content which he appropriates is also connected to ‘emulative’ factionalism: courtly social climbing, a scramble for favour which involves an aggressive competition with aristocratic peers whose virtual identity with oneself generates an affect which is both narcissistic and deeply aggressive. Shakespeare places this deadly affect in close connection with the self-perpetuating violence of the Trojan War, the similarity of the Greeks and Trojans, and the moral bankruptcy of their hollow ethos of warrior manliness. Thus Troilus and Cressida participates in an economy of aggressive-desiring affect which it intensifies to the point of crisis. The play does this by acerbically scrutinizing and re-enacting the stories told and retold by the narrators of a mythic warrior class, only to corrode their authority at each successive performance. What the play lays bare is a nefarious temporality both condemned and underpinned yet ultimately eroded by the relentless literary epochality of the successive Troy narratives.

Stephanie Trigg poses