Shakespeare and the Early Modern Self 169
Shakespeare becomes something less than a god, paring his nails
above his creation. Here he displays his prejudices— which are in
many ways those of the contemporary human, those of the Self.
The quality of the play is almost spectacularly high. It contains
one of Shakespeare’s most famous set pieces, Ulysses’ speech on
order and degree, which was once taken to illustrate something
called the Elizabethan World Picture. If there was an Elizabethan
World Picture, with due commitment to the Great Chain of Being
and the rest, then Shakespeare is a writer out to smash it. Chains
and hierarchies set by God are the last standards that Shakespeare
aff irms, and the speech figures in the play as a piece of irony.
U lysses is an arch double- dealer and hypocrite in a play teeming with
double- dealers and hypocrites. After he hits high oratory on the
matter of order and degree, he goes to work hatching a new plot.
It is in Troilus and Cressida that the poet of negative capability
makes his view of the world most positively pre sent. There are twin
protagonists in Romeo and Juliet, the two lovers, but Troilus and
Cressida do not dominate the play that takes their names. Quickly
they drop to the background of the piece. The play develops into a
Brechtian mélange of characters for a while, until one emerges at the
center. But what happens to that mélange is well worth contem-
plating. Achilles is a besotted fool; Patroclus a fi gure both narcis-
sistic and stupid; Hector a fraud; Ulysses a hustler; Ajax a lout; Paris
a ninny. Helen is a whore and Cressida (in time) is too.
One knows these facts because one follows the characters and
their actions, but one knows, too, because Thersites proclaims
them, over and over again. Homer gives Thersites his few lines close
to the opening of the great poem. Shakespeare allows his Thersites
gradually but inexorably to take over his play. Thersites is the
rancid, resentful, poxed chorus who reduces everything he encoun-
ters to a level even below his own, impossible as that may sound.
He is the walking embodiment of the reductive fallacy, the view that