The quotation is from The Merchant of Venice, but the allusion is not to Troilus and Cressida. Cressida leaves Troilus only hours after she leaves Troy, while he watches from the shadows, so there is no room in Shakespeare's play for any moonlit nights of watching from the walls. The allusion is to Chaucer's poem, and shows that the differences between the poem and the play were intentional on Shakespeare's part. It would be easy to assume that he had not read Chaucer; the fact that he had makes a comparison between the two works even more interesting.
The moon shines bright: in such a night as this
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees
And they did make no noise, in such a night
Troilus me thinks mounted Troyan walls,
And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents
Where Cressid lay that night.
Shakespeare's Troilus after Chaucer's is like the big day that finally arrives and does not measure up to too great expectations. The air is less sweet and the light less bright, but it was the expectations that were out of line. Chaucer's poem is a love story, pure but not simple. Shakespeare's play is something else. The story of the lovers is shoved closer to the war in the background, and is made to carrya theme rather than acting as the theme.
In Troilus and CriseydeChaucer wove Greek myth and courtly love into the fabric of his story, and then enriched the tapestry with such a wealth of insight that the poem is neither a story of courtly love nor a story of Greek heroes, but a tale of the love of Troilus and Criseyde. The beauty of that tale does not spring from Chaucer's sources, but from Chaucer himself.
Greek myth, first of all, takes up very little of Chaucer's time. The story itself, of course, is part of the Greek story (though it was added late)--but Chaucer goes outside the Troilus-Criseyde chapter only when it is absolutely necessary. Hector is included to have someone to compare Troilus to. The lovers use Deiphibus' house for their first vows, and Deiphibus captures Diomedes' arms (and Troilus' brooch, revealing Criseyde's infidelity). Cassandra interprets a dream. Achilles kills Hector and Troilus. Helen herself has a walk-on part. Even the war that threatens to raze Troy is mentioned mainly as a gauge of Troilus' state of mind--he fights well or does not fight at all, depending on how his love is going. Only Troilus, Criseyde and Pandarus figure importantly in the story, and they are Chaucer's own.
Chaucer uses courtly love differently. He takes only the parts of the myth that he needs to fill out his story; he uses the whole courtly love structure, and goes beyond it. He includes all of the conventions: both lovers are stricken with love "at first sight;" Troilus is sick with love and feels unworthy; they exchange letters; Troilus pledges obedience; both pledge faithfulness. But they realize that it is a ritual, a game. Troilus asks Pandarus, "What do I do now?" and Pandarus says, "Write a letter." So Troilus writes a letter, using all the phrases ". . . that in swich caas thise loveres alle seeche." Criseyde, when she gets the letter, does not think, "How beautiful--how romantic," but "He made that move well." Both Chaucer and his lovers use courtly love as a convention--not completely seriously. It is the detail that Chaucer adds beyond the convention that makes the story convincing and touching.
Most of that detail lies in the portraits of the three main characters--drawn so well that the outcome of their interaction is at once inevitable and painfully beautiful. Troilus is the least complex of the three. He is not by any means shallow; his character is simple because it is not at all deceptive.
. . . as fer as tonges spaken,He is an innocent, completely innocent and believably innocent. He repeats several times that no matter how the affair turns out, he has done nothing wrong-- and he is right. A great scoffer (at love) and a great soldier, he is converted in the twinkling of an eye, and becomes a great lover and a greater soldier. Already "gentil," love makes him moreso, and when he goes hunting he lets the small beasts go. Few men have been "as true as Troilus."
Ther nas a man of gretter hardinesse
Than he, ne more desired worthinesse.
Pandarus is less noble, and it should be easy to dislike him. If he does accomplish anything, if he does bring anything about that would not have happened eventually anyway, he does it by trickery, by playing cruelly on Criseyde"s fears. He says his motives justify his means, and to a certain extent they do. He is certainly moved by Troilus' condition: he ". . . weex wel neigh deed for routhe." Quite a bit of his sneaking around can be excused as growing out of friendship, but after he has fulfilled that obligation he still pushes on. When he keeps working after Troilus is content, and still by trickery, it is hard not to suspect that there is at least a little of the lecher in him. It should be easy to dislike him, but it is not. He may be lecher and he may be sneaky, but he still a pleasant old man. The fool in him and his genuine desire to improve Troilus' lot make him likable, and Chaucer is a better poet for not letting us blame him too severely.
Criseyde is the most complex and most interesting character in the poem. She has a reputation for faithlessness, but as Chaucer portrays her she is beautiful and nearly forgivable. Her desertion of Troilus is certainly unforgivable, but it springs from weakness, not malice, and if it is hard to understand rationally, it works very well emotionally--because Criseyde is the "ferefulleste wight that mighte be." Her ruling passion is a desire for security and certainty. She wants as little as possible to do with anything adventurous, and that includes love, which is by definition uncertain. But she is very early in the poem put into the worst possible position. Her father has turned traitor, leaving her alone in a city full of potential enemies, with only Uncle Pandarus to protect her. When Pandarus, who knows her well enough to know exactly what he is doing, threatens to withdraw his protection unless she favors Troilus, she has little choice. That she falls in love with him is a fortunate coincidence.
So she goes along with her uncle's wishes, and not only does not lose an uncle; she also gains a second protector and regains her composure. With a well ordered life and a lover, she is ecstatic. She does not suffer any pangs of conscience because her initial hesitancy was not caused by any set of principles. She was merely afraid of what people would say if they found out.
Then, when the storm has passed and the waves have calmed and Troilus and Criseyde are sailing blissfully toward the sunset, she is thrown overboard, with no one to protect her, until one of the papa sharks makes a gallant offer. And soon, ". . . into his net Criseydes herte (he) brings."
Criseyde's decision to love Diomedes (faithfully, she says) is the climax of the poem. She is desperately in love with Troilus, and was divinely happy with him. She is angry with him when he suggests that the Greeks might be attractive. She has sworn by all the gods that she will remain faithful to him. It is completely illogical for her to become Diomedes' mistress, but Chaucer makes it work.
If she had stayed in Troy, she would have been as true as Troilus, and they would have lived happily ever after. In the Greek camp, however, it is not really a matter of "remaining" faithful. "Remaining" is a poor word for the decisive actions she would have to take to get back to Troy. Without Pandarus to egg her on, there is little chance that she will get up enough courage to take that leap. So she lets it slide, and before long she has been in the Greek camp two months instead of ten days. And Diomedes has been working, offering to be her lover and protector. With misgivings at first, she accepts. Chaucer would forgive her if he possibly could, and we should take our cue from him, Criseyde is weak, but beautifully and lovably human.
Chaucer would say that, in spite of how it turned out, Troilus' love for Criseyde was worth it, that even though it was a "double sorwe," it was worth it to have loved. Graham Greene uses a quotation by Leon Bloy to head his novel The End of the Affair: "Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering, in order that they may have existence." In the poem Chaucer has Pandarus deny that, and even more disconcerting than Pandarus' trickery is his inability to understand what Troilus has gone through. Just when it seems as if the gods should write in the sky that "Troilus has loved Criseyde," Pandarus suggests that Troilus should grow up, because men have lost in love before. In Ionesco's Exit the King,when the king is dying someone remarks that "he acts as if no one has ever died before," and someone else replies that "no one has ever died before." For Troilus, there could be only one love, and that love would be as if no one had ever loved before. Pandarus could not experience anything that deeply. And Criseyde will perhaps have many loves, none like the first and each more dismal than the one before it. Troilus is virtuous. Pandarus is not virtuous. Criseyde is virtuous at the beginning of the poem, but it is a "cloistered virtue."
Perhaps "virtuous" and "not virtuous" are inappropriate, because Chaucer's poem does not really take a moral stance. The lovers say vows of fidelity as they enter an adulterous relationship, and there is never a suggestion that the relationship is anything but beautiful. Yet Chaucer closes the poem with an admonition to young people to learn from his poem the hopelessness of love, and to seek God. He is fully serious in both attitudes. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a quotation which may or may not have any value, said that "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." Chaucer (and with him, perhaps, the rest of the Medieval Age) did that, and functioned magnificently. In this ability to encompass contradictions, the modern world is far weaker. In another part of Troilus and CriseydePandarus says:
Ensample why, see how thise wise clerkesIn other words, as C.S. Lewis says in The Screwtape Letters,the worst sinners make the greatest saints. Chaucer would understand a life of holiness or a life of "sin." He could understand a search far pleasure and the value of pain. What he probably would abhor is what Hesse's Steppenwolf calls "this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity," the petty sameness, the search far contentment and painlessness that has become the modern way of life.
That erren aldermost ayain a lawe,
And been converted from hir wikked werkes,
Thurgh grace of God that list hem to him drawe,
Thanne arn thise folk that han most God in awe,
And strengest faithed been, I understonde,
And conne an errour alderbest withstonde.
Shakespeare uses the same story and the same lovers (not really the same story and not really the same lovers) to go in a different direction. The love story takes up less space even in this far shorter work, and it is cropped at both ends. We are told that Troilus has been courting for months, and that Cressida has also been in Love for "many weary months," but that she has been playing hard to get. We reach Troy just in time for the last days of the courtship,and then, after Troilus has finally won his fair maiden, Cressida is traded off the very next day. By now we have become accustomed to the quickened pace, but not quite accustomed enough to take the next development in stride: after Cressida leaves Troy on that fateful morning, she makes a doubly eventful day of it by giving in to Diomedes that very night.
Shakespeare is of course limited by the amount of time given to an Elizabethan playwright--he cannot conveniently put in the program below "Act II": "Pandarus' house; two months have passed." That does explain much of the condensation of the love story, but it does not explain the bringing of the war into the foreground. A great deal of the play is taken up with battles and truces and discussions of the war which are not directly related to Troilus and Cressida at all. But the play is entitled Troilus and Cressida,and there is a relationship between the two separate actions.
Neither story line, as Shakespeare unfolds them, is cut from the heroic mold. The characters involved in the story are far less beautiful, less vibrant than Chaucer's characters. There is no attempt to forgive Cressida here. She is not "terribly fearful," but, instead, is incredibly easily persuaded. "The error of our eye directs our mind," she says of her sex. She has no "honour" at all, and will not be true to Diomedes or any of her future lovers.
Shakespeare's Troilus is younger than Chaucer's, but not as innocent. He begs Pandarus to help him win Cressida. He does not offer her his obedience. Instead of cursing the morning of his first (and last) night with her, he is resigned to leaving. There is no protestation when she is false that he still loves her. When Cressida asks him before she leaves for the Greek camp if hewill be: true, he says,
Fear not ay truth: the moral of my witThere is no effort, no virtue in his fidelity; it is a part of his character, his "vice," his "fault." He cannot help being true. It is a perceptive insight, but nevertheless a deflating one.
Is 'plain and true'; there's all the reach of it,
Pandarus is more lecherous, and more gleeful about his lechery. He makes it obvious that the courtship has been toward a different end than Chaucer's. After the lovers have said their vows of fidelity, Pandarus sighs in relief that the ordeal of the courtship is over and says immediately, "Whereupon I will show you a chamber with a bed." That bed has been the point of the whole thing. Then Pandarus says:
And Cupid grant all tongue-tied maidens hereThe war is not picturesque, either. Both sides wonder whether it is worth it to fight a war over Helen, who is more often referred to as a whore than as beautiful. The Greeks make jokes about Menelaus' horn, and seem to be fighting mainly because they have committed themselves. Many of the Trojans suggest giving Helen back. Paris and Troilus consider the fight a gallant one, but Thersites balances them with his cynicism: "Lechery, lechery! still wars and lechery! nothing else holds fashion. A burning devil take them!"
Bed, chamber, Pandar to provide this gear!
The most important fact about this war, however, is that both Achilles and Ajax have become too proud to fight. The gods have decreed that Troy will be destroyed, and the reason the Greeks are having such a tough time of it, says Ulysses, is that they have not observed "degree":
Take but degree away, untune that string,The source d all the trouble, says Ulysses (and probably Shakespeare), is that Achilles and Ajax have stepped out of their bounds, have destroyed the will of many other soldiers, and have ruined the harmony of the Greek army. There is less action and more talk in this play than there is most of Shakespeare's plays (it would not work well on stage) and this could show an effort on Shakespeare's part to get at ideas. It is certainly one of the most poetic of the plays; many of the lines read as well as any others. If Shakespeare is trying to get at ideas here, the main idea he is trying to get at is that of degree, of the natural order of things. Disturbing that order, says Shakespeare, will result in chaos. This theme brings the love story and the war story together. Cressida's falsehood acts as a symbol of the breaking of degree. If the obligations between lovers are not met, other obligations are less likely to be met.
And, hark, what discord follows!
Shakespeare's theme is as different from Chaucer's as his play is from the poem. Chaucer's work is a case for fervency, for strong emotions, for love. Shakespeare's is a case for order. Chaucer's is naive; Shakespeare's is cynical. Chaucer's is young in spirit; Shakespeare's is old.
They do come together on at least one point. They both ask a question which is extremely important to us now. Shakespeare implies it through the whole play. Chaucer has Troilus ask it at the end of the poem:
Who shal now trowe on any othes mo?