The title is a line fragment, spoken by Troilus at the end of Troilus and Cressida. Troilus laments the death of his brother, Hector (the great Trojan hero), and cloaks his own frustrations in anger and resolution. Having lost his first love, Cressida, and now his brother to the besieging Greeks, he rages bitterly, inviting destruction itself. Troilus’ lines are partly a response to Aeneas, who tells Troilus that his ominous forecasts due to Hector’s ignominious death have upset everyone.
Aeneas says, “My lord, you do discomfort all the host“. Troilus’ replies with his final lines in the play:
You understand me not that tell me so.
I do not speak of flight, of fear, of death,
But dare all imminence that gods and men
Address their dangers in. Hector is gone.
Who shall tell Priam so, or Hecuba?
Let him that will a screech-owl aye be called
Go into Troy and say their Hector’s dead.
There is a word will Priam turn to stone,
Make wells and Niobes of the maids and wives,
Cold statues of the youth and, in a word,
Scare Troy out of itself.
But march away.
Hector is dead.
There is no more to say.
Stay yet. You vile abominable tents,
Thus proudly pitched upon our Phrygian plains,
Let Titan rise as early as he dare,
I’ll through and through you! And, thou great-sized
coward,
No space of earth shall sunder our two hates.
I’ll haunt thee like a wicked conscience still,
That moldeth goblins swift as frenzy’s thoughts.
Strike a free march to Troy! With comfort go.
Hope of revenge shall hide our inward woe. (T&C, 5.11.12-31)
Rage flows through this play, and few (if any) of the classical characters really come off well. So, it seems fitting that it should end on this note, with the death of Hector, and the subsequent final speech by the syphilitic Pandarus, who bequeaths death by venereal disease on the audience. A dark ending indeed, because it points the way downward–indicating a point in an arc of descent that, in spite of the play’s grim events, suggests that there may be much further down yet to go. This suggests the beginning of a revenge tragedy of sorts.
This description might be accurate enough, because Achilles (the “great-sized coward”), who killed Hector, is himself eventually slain as well. The virtually unbeatable, mighty warrior’s vulnerable heel is pierced by Paris’ arrow. His death comes from a distance, in such a way that Achilles cannot bring his own great power to bear against his demise face to face.
Actually tragedy runs both directions in Shakespeare’s play, with rage in the beginning and the end. Opening with Achilles’ petulant enraged refusal to fight, and ending with the death of Hector, the whole play is already imbedded deep in the siege of Troy.* This human war started as a disagreement amongst the gods**–ripples in a pond. Shakespeare’s play parallels Homer’s famous account of the war, with Troilus and Cressida ending as The Iliad begins, in rage. As Robert Fagles translates it, the opening lines of The Iliad read:
Rage — Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.***
Interestingly, this translation strikes reasonably close to the “wicked conscience””that moldeth goblins”, as Achilles’ rage is both murderous and doomed, “hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls”. That a conscience should be wicked somehow seems peculiar. That a conscience, something that ideally nudges or urges one back to the path of light, should instead turn sour like milk left out for too long on a warm day. That a conscience might become overzealous or overreaching, until a vision of the right or true or good supplants the actual–the right or good or true become a windmill giant, a scarecrow demon at which the altered conscience carries us willy nilly, into the maw of overstepping understanding. A conscience gone rancid, incapable of distinction, reaching eagerly for souls, for any souls, perhaps seeing them as all bad now, to hurl them down to the House of Death.
Troilus’ resolution for vengeance tastes of fading nobility, fading resolve pickled in anger. Shakespeare was no stranger to this, to the idea of anger gone bad. Repeatedly, the plays give us moments of rancor, glimpses of characters for whom bitter resentment or suspicion has festered, or even worse, arises full fledged, misplaced, to strike at the innocent. Onlookers cannot understand, as indeed, in life, the only one who really knows the anger is the one within it, and then only for a proverbial moment.
Again and again we see it.
In King Lear,King Lear’s faithful servant, Kent, tries to stop the old king from punishing his daughter for a her reply (which he has failed to understand). “Come not between the dragon and his wrath” Lear snarls at him, the words spoken on the cusp of his most terrible, fatal mistake, as he banishes Cordelia, the one honest daughter of his three, the only one who loves him unreservedly.
In Othello, turned to terrible suspicion by Iago’s wicked words, Othello becomes certain that his wife, Desdemona, has been unfaithful to him. He comes in wrath to murder her and she cannot begin to understand his anger. She kneels and says to him, “I understand a fury in your words/but not the words.” The presence of wrath is clear, but it is nonsensical, an unspeaking foul presence in the room between them. Iago’s infectious rancor, nurtured into a cloud that now engulfs them all.
Leontes in The Winter’s Tale leaps onto his own ledge, suddenly, wildly, accusing his wife, Queen Hermione, of infidelity. Oedipus kills (unbeknownst to him) his father, Laius, in an angry quarrel, and marries his own mother (again not knowing it is she), Jocasta, after answering the riddle of the sphinx. In each of these cases, and in many more, anger precipitates the action of the play, and in each of these cases, rage prefaces deadly weather.
Perhaps this is what a wicked conscience is, not a conscience at all any more, but a warped shadow of what it had been. Conscience extinguished like a candle going out. Become life as an idiot’s tale.
But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao
You ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow. (The Beatles, “Revolution”)
Perhaps this becomes most alarming when we see world leaders embrace this kind of rage, remaining as contemptuous of others as they must be (perhaps only their deepest most secret places) of themselves. Admiring despots. Dismissing those who might acknowledge the needs of common people, those who may not be billionaires. Seizing power where they can. Blasting those perceived as opposition. Relishing the thuggish rhetoric of power and religion that have turned their faces from the light.
At some point, rage begins to change the timbre of the world, changing all subsequent things and events. It distorts and infects not just the enraged, but all with whom it comes into contact. Then we all become the devil, walking down the stairs forever.
One might project, not wrongly, that such an idea might resonate with the work of the Rolling Stones. Perhaps “Sympathy for the Devil”? Not quite.
More like where the enraged all go, when we finally paint everything as darkness:
Chinese folk Buddhism is filled with hungry ghosts, the spirits of those who lived in an animalistic way, living unbalanced lives that have been driven by their emotions. These spirits wander the earth forever, always hungry, always trying to feed on the excrement of the living. It has been touched on previously in this blog, but the idea bears repeating. If you decide to run any organisation, be it a corporation, a country, or a university like a mob boss, you might wish to recall how the careers of most mob bosses usually end.
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*The Trojan War began when Paris abducted the famous beauty Helen from her husband Menelaus, the King of Sparta. Menelaus subsequently gathers all the Greek (Achaean) forces and sails to Troy to besiege the fortress city–a siege that lasted ten years.
**The disagreement was between the goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite over who might be fairest (with the prize being the golden apple of discord). Zeus, aware of the challenges that would attend such a contest, sent the goddesses to Paris to let him judge. He declared Aphrodite the fairest. It won him Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, but it also earned him the strife brought on by the other two–who were, again, filled with rancorous rage that he had not chosen them.
***Robert Fagles translated The Iliad for Viking in 1990, with an introduction and notes by Bernard Knox. The book is relatively easy to find, still in print, and readily available on ereader services as well.