Shakespeare

Dilation and Inflation 325puts off the conventional end of comedy—is finally all tumid or inflated middle,for all of its apocalyptic (or politically strategic) projections of an end or “fine.”Its figures of that tumid or inflated middle include not only the diseased body ofPandarus, the prototypical go-between, but also the hybridity or betweenness ofAjax himself, the “blended knight, half Troyan and half Greek” (IV.v.86) whose“spacious and dilated parts” are thus themselves a hybrid or mongrel product ofthat mixture, and the hybrid or bastard Thersites. Described in Chapman’sHomer as having “in his ranke minde coppy [i.e., copia] ... of unregarded wordes” 83and functioning in this play as a more scurrilous counterpart to the wordyParolles, Thersites combines the senses of the hybrid, of illegitimacy, and ofcounterfeiting introduced into All’s Well by its marginal “Spurio,” writ large inthis self-consciously spurious, counterfeit, and hybrid play. “Bastard begot,bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard in valor, in every thing illegitimate”(V.vii.16–18). Thersites figures not only its wordiness but its notoriously hybridstatus—as the play that virtually embodies the suspect intermingling or crossbreedingcondemned by Sir Philip Sidney as “mongrel tragicomedy,” abastardizing of the older hierarchies of degree in its own mingling of kings andclowns, including Ajax’s mistaking of the clownish Thersites for Agamemnon(III.iii.261–62). Shakespeare’s Troilus is the “hybrid prodigy” (as Swinburnedubbed it) that subverts both distinctions of class and the pedigree of genre by itsown adulterate or hybrid nature: variously a “history,” a “commedy,” and (in F)The Tragedie of Troilus and Cressida, grafting spurious or bastard kinds onto thearistocratic stock of Homeric epic, sullying the purity of generic breeding evenas it contaminates the professed singleness of “truth’s simplicity” (III.ii.169) byan adulteration associated (as in All’s Well) with the duplicity of women. 84Troilus and Cressida presents, then, a world of inflation in every sense—ofwords, of emulation or honors (the contemporary form of inflation evoked inUlysses’ speech on degree), of value or price, and of a “matter” that is part of“truth tired with iteration,” a well-worn and perhaps finally bankrupt epictradition. 85 Its “Mistress Thersites” (II.i.36)—together with its pervasive figuresof effeminacy—calls attention not just to courtiers as men of words, associatedwith the effeminacy of Parolles and the wordy new man, but also institutions likethe Inns of Court linked with the need to cure language of its excesses, whetheror not there is anything to their association with an intended performance of thisplay. 86 Shakespeare’s Troilus is a play that lends itself to topical analysis, not justin relation to a War of the Theaters in which bombast figured so prominently,but also in its protracted and unheroic War of Troy, which may have beeninspired by the seemingly interminable and anything but heroic contemporarycampaign in Ireland. 87 Like both All’s Well That Ends Well and Hamlet, plays thatshare its figures of inflation and increase, Troilus suggests not just theinflationary social and economic milieu or the inflation of honors (and hysteriaof imitation and emulation) contemporary with it but also the legacy of the lastyears of Elizabeth, including the tensions between an increasingly ineffectual