Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-p2v8j Total loading time: 0.001 Render date: 2024-06-07T12:57:35.423Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - “The alteration of men”: Troilus and Cressida, Troynovant, and trade

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 September 2009

Douglas Bruster
Get access

Summary

I have an excellent thought: if some fifty of the Grecians that were crammed in the horse belly had eaten garlic, do you not think the Trojans might have smelt out their knavery?

Sly, in Webster's Induction to The Malcontent (1604)

We are so asotted with these delights, so blinded with the love, and drunken with the sweetness of these vanities, that greedily we flock together, and with our brainsick assemblies not unlike to the Troyans hale in the horse, whose bowels have been many times gaged with the sword of his truth …

Stephen Gosson on London's playhouses, in Plays Confuted (1582)

When, in Twelfth Night (1601), one coin already well in hand, Feste begs another of Viola, he applies a commercial gloss to the Troilus and Cressida legend:

FESTE. Would not a pair of these have bred, sir?

VIOLA. Yes, being kept together, and put to use.

FESTE. I would play Lord Pandarus of Phrygia, sir, to bring a Cressida to this Troilus.

VIOLA. I understand you, sir. 'Tis well begg'd.

FESTE. The matter, I hope, is not great, sir – begging but a beggar:

Cressida was a beggar.

(3.1.49–55)

In personifying the two coins – the one as Troilus, the other Cressida – and endowing them with desires and traits of their own, Feste participates in what I have described in the preceding pages as the tendency of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama to objectify the personal.

Type
Chapter
Information
Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare , pp. 97 - 117
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×