Poetic Drama as Civic Discourse: Troilus and Cressida, an Allegory of Elizabeth I's “Common Weal”

Abstract

An allegoresis of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida illuminates this drama as the playwright's act of mythopoesis that characterizes and interprets the second half of Elizabeth I's reign as an historical and political journey through adversities, crises, and conflict to a moment of unified redemption. Action and dialogue allegorically represent the diverse and disparate civic voices of this journey. The drama is Shakespeare's own civic voice morally and ethically arguing and assessing the period as an arrival to national unification, self-identity, and well-being.

Notes

¹I offer my gratitude to RR reviewers Mark Gellis and Andrew King for their insightful recommendations, and to Theresa Jarnagin Enos and Rhetoric Review for their patience.

²Allegory of typology as relying on well-established pre-texts—in this instance, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Homer's Iliad; allegory of reification as relying on allusive tropes such as irony, metaphor, simile, pun, image, and personification that are culturally understood by the audience. See Quilligan (ad passim) and Barney (30–38). The two classes of allegory need not be mutually exclusive; they can be simultaneously incorporated into one allegorical work and can support each other to convey the author's perceptions.

³All quotations from Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

⁴For a concise and comprehensive history of Commons' escalating voice and its rise to power, see J. E. Neale's introduction (15–29) and his conclusion (417–24) in Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments 1559–1581; and the conclusion (434–39) of Neale's Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments 1584–1601. Neale identifies the birth of Commons' evolving empowerment with Sir Thomas More's plea for parliamentary freedom of speech as early as 1523 during the reign of Henry VIII.

⁵Although probable sources, none of these names appear in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde or in George Chapman's Iliad. Only one reference to the Dardan gate appears in Lydgate's Troy Book, in which it is synonymous with the famous Scaean Gate of Iliad fame. It was referred to as the Dardan gate because it faced northwest toward the Dardanelles. Only until the twentieth century did archaeological evidence at the Troy site in Hycarlic suggest other gateway entrances in Troy's walls.

⁶Ordish identifies seven gates in Elizabethan London: Aldgate, Bishopgate, Moorgate, Cripplegate, Aldersgarte, Newgate, and Ludgate (5). However, Moorgate was considered a minor gate and originally a postern that would leave a total of six main gates for Elizabethan Londoners. The other six gates mentioned were the original six that descended from the Medieval Period. Another gate, adjacent to the Tower of London, had been demolished to construct the Tower, and only a pedestrian passageway remained.

⁷Graves uses an interesting turn of phrase for patronage recipients' commitment: “They also reinforced loyalty by pandering to self-interest” (114).

⁸The “pearl” metaphor as Elizabeth in this context in all probability held three significances for the Elizabethan audience: (1) At least from the time of the poetic works of the anonymous “Pearl Poet,” the pearl signifies purity thereby affirming Elizabeth as the “Virgin Queen”; (2) Elizabeth's purity in relation to God and her Realm are divinely ordained; and (3) in like to “divine,” she is ubiquitously felt yet distant and tenuous, one whose relation is not easily attained. Elizabeth's symbolic association with pearls is clearly depicted in her Pelican Portrait, c. 1575, and the Armada Portrait of 1588; her gowns and her hair are encrusted with pearls, and she is portrayed in both portraits with elaborate displays of pearl necklacing. From another perspective: In the Parliamentary session of 1597–98 when monopolies, granted under the authority of her Royal Prerogative, were being challenged by the House of Commons as lending to abuses affecting the welfare of the poor, the Lord Keeper, Sir Thomas Egerton, quoted her response in stating: “Her Majesty … hoped that her dutiful and loving subjects would not take away her Prerogative—which is the chiefest flower in her garland and the principal and head pearl in her crown and diadem” (Neale, 1584–1601 355).

⁹Further exploration in identifying allegory as another separate and distinct mode of drama within the corpus of Shakespeare's plays appears viable. Preliminary examination of The Tempest has already indicated to me strong allegorical elements at work and consistent in execution with Troilus and Cressida. They lead me to consider the plays two pieces of a set as “allegory/drama”—a protracted legend of the Tudor Dynasty and its relinquishing evolution to the Stuarts. This preliminary thesis would also include Henry VIII as a necessary stage for Troilus and Tempest to complete the set as a dynastic work.

¹⁰… and possibly propaganda for Elizabeth's recent favor toward the House of Commons, also a positive assessment of her reign for the chronicles of history.

¹¹See Dennis Slattery's discussion of mythopoesis as “the ground of narrative knowing” in Sophocles' Theban Plays and the journey from the profane to the sacred in his essay, “Oedipus at Colonus: Pilgrimage from Blight to Blessedness” (ad passim).