johnlee
’tis valued?’^20 Throughoutthe play, value threatens to collapse into valuation, and
various images of the transience of mortality and mortal achievements are given.
The most famous, perhaps, occurs as Ulysses attempts to persuade Achilles to
return to the battlefield. He urges him to understand that his past deeds and glory
count for little, since ‘Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,|Wherein he puts
alms for oblivion,|A great-sized monster of ingratitudes’.^21 Agamemnon repeats
something similar to Hector. The past and future are, for him, both ‘strewed with
husks|And formless ruin of oblivion’; words are only genuine in their moment
of utterance; time will drain them of their meaning.^22 Hardy, in seeing the Great
War as threatening oblivion, insists that Shakespeare’s works are no such ‘alms’
or ‘husks’; Shakespeare’s works now have an existence independent of human
valuation, and hence Hardy’s depiction of them as an elemental force like the wind.
That wind may itself be felt blowing through Hardy’s poem at this point, as
Troilus and Cressidaoffers to characterize Hardy’s conception of the war. The
play is generally categorized as a ‘problem play’, a term that had been adopted by
Frederic Boas in 1896, in part as a response to the play’s relationship to tradition.
This relationship Boas found barely understandable:
That the creator of a Prince Henry and a Hotspur should bring on the stage in travestied
form the glorious paragons of antiquity, an Achilles and an Ajax, is at first sight one of
the most startling phenomena in literature. It looks as if Shakespeare, conscious that he
was wrestling with Homer for the supreme poetic crown of all time, thought to secure
victory by heaping ridicule upon his rival. But for such a view there is not the slightest solid
foundation.^23
Such a view, however, makes good sense of a play in which the story of the fall of
Troy, one of the founding narratives of the Western literary tradition, is reduced
to the story of ‘a whore and a cuckold’.^24 Fussell, in upbraiding David Jones, had
insisted that the tradition of war writing ‘contains, unfortunately, no precedent
for an understanding of war as a shambles and its participants as victims’.^25 It is
a remarkable statement, because so untrue; here again the violence that Fussell’s
commitment to a modernist ideology is doing to his critical acumen is to be felt.
Shakespeare, inTroilus and Cressida, offers a far better, more incisive, and more
intelligent characterization of war as a meaningless butcher’s house than any Great
War poet. TheHenriaddoes a far more sophisticated job of undermining notions
of glory than anything achieved by Sassoon or Owen. More particularly, Falstaff’s
abuse of the King’s press to raise ‘food for powder’, as he calls his men, and money
for himself, goes quite beyond any depiction of Great War injustices by English
(^20) Shakespeare,Troilus and Cressida,ii.ii. 52. (^21) Ibid.iii.iii. 145–7.
(^22) Ibid.iv.v. 166–7.
(^23) Frederic Boas,Shakespeare and his Predecessors(London: John Murray, 1896), 377.
(^24) Shakespeare,Troilus and Cressida,ii.iii. 68.
(^25) Fussell,Great War and Modern Memory, 147.