Performativity and the Performance of the Recalcitrant Body in Troilus and Cressida1

Blackfriars Conference 2013

Freddie Harris Ramsby

In Renaissance Figures of Speech,2 Sylvia Adamson et al reference the close

connection between rhetoric and poetics in the Renaissance and how the literary and

rhetorical were merged in a variety of rhetorical situations from “debates or speeches of

praise to political argument or courtroom drama” (4). Adamson et al thus highlight what is

traditionally regarded as rhetoric’s role in the Renaissance—persuasion in civic domains,

with a healthy dose of style! As they point out, the performance of rhetoric was also

ubiquitous on the stage. Certainly Erasmus, the maestro of humanist rhetorical

amplification, had a tremendous influence on playwrights: Jeffrey J. Yu3 writes that

Erasmus’ De Copia was "the greatest single influence upon the way Shakespeare order[ed]

ideas" and that "Shakespeare was ... the alpha-plus boy who took the Erasmusian

instructions about varying and amplifying an idea to heights unparalleled."

To illustrate rhetoric’s traditional function as persuasion and style, Adamson et al

index a scene from Troilus and Cressida (hereafter Troilus):

Cressida: Will you walk in my lord?

Troilus: O Cressid, how often have I wished me thus!

Cressida: Wished my lord? The gods grant—o my Lord!

Troilus: What should they grant? What makes this pretty interruption? (3.2)

Adamson et al note that Cressida’s interruption, a performance of the rhetorical figure

aposiopesis, whereby an orator breaks off his/her speech in order to perform bashfulness,

fear, anger, sorrow etc., demonstrates either Cressida being truly self-conscious or an

“artful Cressida” performing reticence (5). Whether she is feigning bashful or not,

Adamson et al see her use of aposiopesis as seductive persuasion, enacting Mary Lady

1 I use the Arden Shakespeare’s edition of Troilus and Cressida. Ed. David Bevington.

2 Adamson, Sylvia, Gavin Alexander and Katrin Ettenhuber. Eds. Renaissance Figures of Speech. Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 2007. Print 3 Comparative Drama 41.1 (2007) 79-106. Web,

Wroth’s4 idea of coquettishness: “Desiring to bee thought bashfull, but more longing to bee

intreated for the rest: (qtd in Adamson et al, 5).

Cressida has famously been regarded suspiciously, until recent decades when

feminist literary theorists and directors took up her plight. So it’s no surprise that Adamson

et al question her authenticity. But what I see as cautionary behaviour—both with Troilus

and with her encounter with the Greek Diomedes—has been established as duplicity,

summed up by Troilus’ infamous lines: “this is, and is not, Cressid” (V.II)—a line that

highlights the play’s preoccupation with indeterminacy. With this in mind, the lines

proceeding, “will you walk in my lord,” and Troilus’ famous accusation, index Cressida’s

body as a fluctuating signifier, ready to be “filled” and constituted by the language of others.

Her body reflects whatever the Greek or Trojan warriors would have it signify given the

social and political attitudes expressed in the play. Nevertheless, while her body is

established by figures of war, economy, or patriarchy, Cressida performs her awareness of

these rhetorical norms by drawing our attention to her limited performance space within

them; and she does this through regular use of aposiopesis; she is a consistent

contradiction, embodying aposiopesis within the confines of the illogicality of the

patriarchy and the effects of its language on the bodies of women. It’s no wonder that she is

consistently stopped in her tracks.

In positing Cressida’s self-awareness, and her constitution of self by others,

Shakespeare employs his rhetorical means to, as Peter Womack5 states, “[play] with the

levels of power in society” (80). We might extend this to his treatment of women. In terms

of how Shakespeare offers Cressida the space (albeit tragically) to push against the

confines of the language that constitutes her, I argue that her performance expands our

notion of not only renaissance rhetoric uses of style, (embodied by actors to give us both

overt and implicit insight into their characters), but 20th and 21st century rhetorical theory.

In fact, Cressida embodies a dramatic enactment of theories of performativity, especially

those advanced by Judith Butler. Indeed, while still engaging rhetoric’s concern with

dramatic figures of speech, I believe Troilus performs something like proto- theories of

performativity. My purpose here is not to reiterate the feminist readings of Cressida that

4 The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania

5 English Renaissance Drama. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. Print.

have dominated the literacy scene since the early 1970s--readings that establish her in a

feminist light against constructions of Cressida-as-whore that so dominated before the70s-

- but to observe her role as embodying a figure of speech associated with one who is so

overcome by emotion, that she is literally figured into consistent vacillation. This

enactment of a figure of speech renders performative theory more tangible, more

embodied. However, it is crucial that for aposiopesis to be a truly embodied act of theory

that performs the confines and affordances of performativity, an actress playing Cressida

must inhabit it. Its propensity as a figure of speech that indicates indecision—a figure that

to be readable must be accompanied by certain gestures to indicate one who must stop

because she is so overcome with emotion—is lost if the figurative gestures are abandoned

by the actor.

**********

Performativity, as developed by Butler, constitutes rhetorical theory in that it

addresses bodies, as Kenneth Burke6 puts it, as “generators of belief” (105). In A Rhetoric of

Motives, Burke expands the notion of rhetoric as persuasion to rhetoric as identification.

Identification marks a change in attitude, in sentiment, or action, so that persuasion can

occur (55). Burke says “you persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by

speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his (55

emphasis in original). So, underlying a traditional notion of rhetoric as persuasion is

“identification or consubstantiality in general” (55). Burke argued that communities shape

identity and thus inclinations toward identification (or not), in that as one gathers and

discards identity-building experiences, bodies that interact and identify in communities

shape beliefs about which performances of the body matter, and which don’t. In other

words, to identify in order to persuade, one’s body must index certain beliefs and values--

hence Burke’s comments about the rhetoricity of bodies as generators of belief. We might

thus couple Burke’s observations about bodies with Butler’s definition of performativity.

Butler draws her theories of performativity from J.L Austin’s notion of the

performative wherein a speech act is successful given certain conditions that authorize its

success. Austin writes that in the case of a performative utterance (for instance “I do now

6 Counter-Statement Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1931. Print.

pronounce you man and wife”), one is not just describing the act of marrying, one is, Austin

says, "Indulging in it" (6). In other words, the saying of the utterance is the doing of it: “the

issuing of an utterance is the performing of an action” (Austin 6). Yet, for a performative to

function successfully, it must correspond with what James Loxley7 calls “the facts of a

situation” (2). A performative’s success is relational: “but only for a general dimension of

being a right or proper thing to say as opposed to a wrong thing in these circumstances, to

this audience, for these purposes and with these intentions” (145). So if one is getting

married by one’s little brother in a mock up wedding, the performative will not succeed.

Once he has established the conditions for a performative to work, Austin re-frames all

statements as “speech acts” (139). And, like the performative utterance, all speech acts

must be understood as successful in terms of “how the words stand in respect of

satisfactoriness to the facts, events, situations, &c., to which they refer” (149). Even when

we state something in general, its felicity, its truthfulness, is situational. In short, Austin

collapses statements and performatives into what he terms the “total speech act” (148). We

can no longer think of statements as true and false but that the successfulness of a speech

act is concerned with the conditions within in which it is uttered.

For Butler, the performative is successful, not because of intention or situation, but

by a citational force that authorizes it to bring about the reality that it utters. Citing Jacques

Derrida,8 she connects speech acts and discursive power when she notes that a speech act

is only successful if is a “coded or iterable utterance…identifiable as conforming with an

iterable model” (Derrida qtd. in Butler 51). A performative is thus not successful because

the utterer has total agency or complete control over his/her intention: She says “a

performative provisionally succeeds… not because an intention successfully governs the

actions of speech but only because that action echoes prior actions and accumulates the

force of authority through the repetitions or citation of a prior and authoritative set of

practices” (51 emphasis in original). A speech act then is successful if it is recognizable

through its consistent reiteration in “ritualized practice” (51).

7 Performativity. New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.

8 Excitable Speech

Butler expands her strand of Austinian performativity to bodily performances. For

Butler, performativity is not just what one does when one is performing the body—how the

body is brought into being through performances of gender, for example—but how one is

constrained in that performance, in performances shaped by community attitudes, by

situations, but more importantly by the authority of discourses which draw their power

from consistent reiteration. One exists then, not only by being recognized but recognizable

within the discursive conditions that make one intelligible in the communities within which

one is attempting to identify. Yet between reiterations of a performance of identifiable

attitudes, there is room to re-perform in ways that exceed normative discourse. Butler 9

sees performance, then, as a means to push the boundaries of the discursive constraints of

bodily performativity (155). And this has something to do with the potentiality of the

space that exists in-between iterations of conventional bodily behaviour and bodily

construction. This potentiality is also assumed in the function of the theatrical space. It is a

space, as Weber points out, “where potentialities are tried out” (46). It is from this

“potential” space that Cressida performs within the language that interpellates her, using

aposiopesis as her only method of pushing against it.

**********

Language’s potentiality within the interpellating effects of convention figures

Troilus’ as rhetorical theory. Troilus thus furthers a postmodern view of language. In the

Rhetorical Tradition, Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg10 note that rhetoric in the

twentieth century encompasses, “a theory of language as a form of social behaviour, of

intention and interpretation as the determinants of meaning, of the way that knowledge is

created by argument, and of the way that ideology and power are extended through

language” (1183). Troilus interrupts the idea that language determines platonic truth with

a capital T, or that there is a definitive relationship between convention, language, and

reality. In fact, it furthers twentieth century rhetorical notions that language is

performance—a sophistic view that renders language as mutable, indeterminate.

9 “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.” The Performance Studies Reader. Ed. Henry Bial. New York:

Routledge. 2004. Print. 154-166. 10 The Rhetorical Tradition. Second ed. Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2001. Print.

I suspect that Shakespeare is onto this given that although his characters are

obsessed with convention, Troilus is saturated with ambiguity. After all, the play is staged

around a war that has no beginning or end; it just goes on and on…and on. So it is crucial to

point out this preoccupation with ambiguity to establish how Shakespeare muddles with

performative convention in terms of Cressida’s actions. Troilus’ particularly disdainful fool,

Thersites, speaks volumes about the Shakespearian agitation of norms with his famous

description of war’s futility:

Here is such patchery, such juggling and such knavery! All argument is a

whore and cuckold; a good quarrel to draw emulous factions and bleed to

death upon. Now the dry serpigo on the subject, and war and lechery

confound all! (2.3)

Thersites’s commentary destabilizes conventional characterizations of Homeric figures.

Menelaus, the legendary king of Sparta, and Helen, possessed of the face that launched a

thousand ships, are now reduced to sordid subversions of Homeric epic. Indeed, as David

Bevington puts it in his introduction to the Arden edition, “Shakespeare has chosen to play

up the worst aspects of Homeric legend” (29). This subversion serves as touchstone—a

central indicator of not only Shakespeare’s critique of the perpetuators of war, but it

shrouds the play in the general flavour of the destabilization of convention.

This destabilization is also performed by the play’s relentless references to truth or

what is true—seemingly nothing in fact. Firstly, the play is riddled with little oxymorons

which problematize the truthfulness of words: Pandarus describes Cressida as “horribly in

love” (3.1.94). When Diomedes arrives to Troy and exchanges caustic comments with the

Greek Aeneas, Paris wryly notes their greetings as “the most despiteful’st gentle greeting,

The noblest hateful love, that e’er I heard of” (4.1.34-35) and later we hear that Troilus

loves Cressida with “so strained a purity” (4.4.23). All these paradoxes seem to indicate

that truth is an illusion—an illusion that Cressida, it seems, has caught on to as she

repeatedly stops herself in her tracks, and changes her mind about who she is and how she

must act.

**********

Cressida pushes the boundaries of limiting discursivity, or rather performs her

awareness of the limits of language and convention through her embodiment of

aposiopesis in two scenes. First, she not only performs it in the excerpt that opens this

paper, but continues to perform it throughout her sexual encounter with Troilus that night

and in the next morning. Her consistent stopping- herself-in-her-tracks on this occasion are

all enacted within the conventions of courtly love11. Indeed, she acknowledges in Act 1 that

she must, if her lover is to stay interested, appear un-interested: “Yet I hold off. Women are

angels wooing;/Things won are done. Joys soul lies in the doing./That she beloved knows

naught that knows not this;/Men prize12 the thing ungained more than it is.” (1.2.276-80).

Not surprisingly, Cressida talks about herself in terms of monetary worth; she is more of an

asset if she doesn’t reveal her desire to Troilus.

Cressida continues to employ aposiopesis on several more occasions in 3.2. Besides

her initial use of the figure, when Troilus asks her why she has played so hard to get, she

responds,

Hard to seem won; but I was won my lord,

With the first glance that ever—pardon me;

If I confess much, you will play the tyrant (3.2.113-115)

In confessing why she has seemed distant, Cressida is overcome, stops in mid-sentence and

berates herself for her confession, her truthfulness. Moments later, she stops herself again:

My thoughts were like unbridled children, grown

Too headstrong for their mother. See, we fools!

Why have I blabb'd? (3.2.118-120)

And then a few lines later:

See, see, your silence,

Cunning in dumbness, from my weakness draws

My very soul of counsel! Stop my mouth. (3.2. 127-129).

In one speech, Cressida interrupts herself no less than 3 times—the last, she actually

verbalizes a variation of “I must shut up now.” My point is, that through her use of

aposiopesis she exposes, albeit rather in-elegantly, the illogicality of the conventions of

courtly love that she is constrained within. One wonders how else she might push up

against its limits.

11

Discussion of which is explored more thoroughly in Chapter 3 of my dissertation. 12 Other editions exchange “prize” for “price”

Cressida knows her body is a commodity. Pandarus, her pimping uncle, entreats the

lovers to kiss with “Go to, a bargain made, Seal it, seal it; I’ll be the witness (3.2.191). And,

as Marjorie Garber13 points out, Cressida asks Troilus twice, “Will you walk in my Lord,”

(3.2. 60/95) which is “the traditional invitation of the prostitute to her customer” (553).

But Garber parallels this with Paris’ later similar invitation to the Greeks, including

Diomedes (who will later claim Cressida--whom, I claim, reluctantly acquiesces), who have

come to collect Cressida in an exchange for the Trojan, Antenor: “Please you walk in, my

lords” (553). Cressida not only maps the language of convention on to her own body, her

own identity, but this identity is ratified by Paris’ invitation. Indeed, she is a body to be

bargained over. She is to be prostituted to the Greeks.

Constituted by this language, Cressida performs her confusion through aposiopesis

within it. On the one hand, this articulation of her body enacts its performative effects

through her behaviour. Once she gets to the Greek camp, she is, as she has been throughout,

interpellated as a prostitute. She gets passed around the Greek commanders, who all kiss

her; to which she responds “with quick sense” as Nestor puts it (4.5.45), (which depending

on the direction a production takes could be incredibly brave, or incredibly short minded

given that she is in an enemy camp.) She puts both Menelaus and Nestor in their places

with her quick wit, which one could construe as either bawdy or self-preservation;

nevertheless, her recognizability as a prostitute is cemented by Ulysses:

Fie, fie upon her!

There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip,

Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out

At every joint and motive of her body….

…Set them down

For sluttish spoils of opportunity

And daughters of the game. (4.5.55-64)

Given Ulysses’ construction of her, as well as her situation in the enemy camp and with

Troilus, her worth as an article of exchange, Cressida is an impossible position—so when

Diomedes comes to Cressida’s tent, she is the epitome of flustered.

13 Shakespeare After All. New York: Anchor, 2004. Print.

When she encounters Diomedes in the Greek camp, Cressida responds to him as her

“guardian.” Many feminist scholars14 have seen Cressida’s indulgence of Diomedes’

advances as a self-protective measure. If she is to survive in such frightening conditions,

she must align herself with a protector. So when she and Diomedes meet alone in Calchas’

tent, she once again performs her confusion within the constraints of her bodily

intelligibility through aposiopesis. While seeming to capitulate to Diomedes’ advances,

Cressida consistently stops herself in what could be construed as panicked moments of

regret for how she must act in the present moment, while she in fact loves Troilus15. What

results is an odd game of tug of war (all puns intended). Cressida goes back and forth in

what seems like a seduction and rejection of Diomedes. After rejecting him, she appears to

call him back with “Guardian!--why, Greek!” but when he demands a token of her, and she

offers the only token she has, Troilus’ sleeve, she snatches it back, stopping herself in mid

sentence: “You look upon that sleeve;/ behold it well. He loved me--O false wench!--Give't

me again” (5.2.72-73). Then later, when Diomedes insists that she pledge to be with him

the next night, she responds in broken sentences, “Ay, come-- O Jove!.--do come.--I shall be

plagued.” (5.2.111). Cressida does not act in confidence, she does not act as though she is

comfortable with the confines of courtly love, or the measure of her body as commodity, or

as a daughter of the game. Instead, Shakespeare surrenders her to the utter confusion of

her bodily constitution, inferred by her constant use of aposiopesis.

**********

While Shakespeare’s subversion of normative discursive convention in Troilus is far

more prolific than spatial limits allow, it is plentiful enough that Cressida’s performance

within it can, in no way, allow for her to be permanently constructed as “false as Cressid.” I

have argued that her consistent use of aposiopesis is the only form of protest against the

constitution of her body by others that she has. And while she is interpellated by others,

made recognizable through them, she still pushes against their constricting force with what

14 For instance, Janet Adelmen 'This Is and Is Not Cressid': The Characterization of Cressida, in The Mother Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, ed. Shirley Nelson Gamer, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1985,119–41. 15

Troilus, of course, sees her actions only through the eyes of a cuckolded courtly lover.

little rhetoric is at her disposal—yet, that small gesture is a rhetorical figure which, given

its textual subtlety, can only be made more tangible by a live body on stage.