Category: Troilus and Cressida

The world of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida does not distinguish decidedly between the Greeks and the Trojans. Though the Greek camp is a makeshift assembly of tents pitched on the shores of Troy, and the Trojan society is the courtly palace of Priam and his sons, both societies value the same ideas and objects: honor in men, and beauty and faithfulness in women, as revealed haphazardly through appearances and acts. The inadequacy of such measures of worth, their failure to be absolute and their failure to be made known, results in the incestuous, inbred world of Troilus and Cressida, where war is conducted as among brothers and sisters: filled with petty rivalries, meaningless, repetitive commerce between camps, and showy tramping back and forth in place of true conflict. Unable to live or act without considerations of value, the cast of Troilus and Cressida create and operate in their own fallen world.

Troilus and Cressida opens immediately in this world of judgment and appraisals. Troilus’s mini-blazon in appreciation of Cressida “Her eyes, her hair, her cheek, her gait, her voice” is soon followed by Pandarus’s attempt to raise Troilus’s station in Cressida’s eyes: Have you any eyes, do you know what a man is? Is not birth, beauty, good shape, discourse, manhood, learning, gentleness, virtue, youth, liberality, and such like, the spice and salt that season a man? The humor in the opening scenes of the play does not arise from the gap between the way women are celebrated and the way in which men are, but rather from Shakespeare’s demonstration that the modes of appraisal are in fact the same; both reduce men and women to objects of desire. In the opening scenes of the play, the lovers do not confront each other except as mediated by Pandarus, who undertakes first to sell Cressida to Troilus (already a lovesick buyer), and then to sell Troilus to Cressida (who is merely playing at being hard to get), through a series of comparisons to other lovers and actors in their tightly scripted world.

Pandarus’s role in Troilus and Cressida, mediating action by attempting to mediate “or provoke” desire, is a problematic one. His exchanges with both Troilus and Cressida are awkward not just because he is the uncle of a well-born woman reduced to the role of a fool or a go-between, but because his praises at times seem to border on the unnatural and the incestuous. In his praise of Cressida, for example, Pandarus cannot help but twice throw in the admission that she is his niece, which forces us to take the dialogue uneasily even if we had not understood it in that way. For my part, she is my kinswoman, says Pandarus; I would not, as they term it, praise her. A few lines later, he again laments: Because she’s kin to me, therefore she’s not so fair as Helen. An she were not kin to me, she would be as fair a Friday as Helen is on Sunday. Speaking of Troilus to Cressida one scene later, Pandarus returns to the theme of illicit admiration. Unable to exalt Troilus as much as he would like himself, he posits a non-existent female relation to perform the desire for him: Had I a sister were a grace, or a daughter a goddess, he should take his choice.

Though this is all part of the show, the business-side of love, Pandarus nonetheless helps to set the claustrophobic and ingrown atmosphere of the play. Taken together, these scenes put Pandarus beyond the role of go-between until he seems not just the champion of the young lovers but their pimp, which he will come to realize by the play’s end. In his closing remarks, Pandarus, the poor agent despised, identifies himself with bawds and traders in the flesh. If the society of Troilus and Cressida is diseased, and the actors in this society are brethren and sisters of the holddoor trade, Pandarus has willingly held the door open for others to pass through. But he is not alone in this charge, which is symptomatic of the undifferentiated society of the play. It reaches the highest levels, as seen marvelously through Ulysses’s humiliating treatment of Cressida upon her arrival at the Greek camp. After the Greek general Agamemnon receives Cressida with a kiss, Ulysses “for no apparent purpose” extends the reception to include all of the other Greeks, from ancient Nestor to cuckold Menelaus: Yet is the kindness but particular. / Twere better she were kissed in general. Ulysses places himself at the end of this string of kisses, but when it comes to be his turn, rejects Cressida’s induced generosity. Why then, for Venus sake, give me a kiss, / When Helen is a maid again, and his, Ulysses says, imposing an impossible condition, the sullied Helen’s maidenhood, on the kiss.

Ulysses’s lines are also significant for another reason. When he requests that Cressida be kissed in general, rather than in particular, Ulysses offers the reader one of the play’s major dichotomies, that of the gap between what is general “absolute or unified” and what is particular contingent or private. It is apt (as far as something like this can be apt) that Agamemnon, as the general of the Greeks, should kiss Cressida; it is not apt that all of the men should then follow suit. By divesting the Greek camp of even this small level of hierarchy in command, Ulysses further contributes to the pervasive lack of hierarchy in all aspects of the play’s world. Ironically, the compulsion of characters in Troilus and Cressida to judge and assess the value of people and actions leads, in the end, to a non-hierarchical society in which everyone is low and equally low. The beautiful Helen flirts shamelessly with Pandarus in 3.1, her only appearance in the play, and Pandarus’s insinuations extend not just to Helen and Cressida but even to Cassandra, the mad prophetic daughter of Priam and not so much a traditional sex object. As he tells Troilus before being cut off: I will not dispraise your sister Cassandra’s wit, but”.

The role of the pimp, as exhibited by Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida, is an unnecessary social role because desire does not have to be performed “through Pandarus’s attempts to raise the stock of both Cressida and Troilus” or mediated. The people do not need a pimp because they have their own private desires and decisions that can be played out in their own time. This is perhaps what gives Troilus and Cressida its trace of tragedy: the play world is hostile to any sort of true union between Troilus and Cressida because it insists on turning private and subjective valuations into public and absolute ones. Ulysses’s speech in 1.3, upholding the specialty of rule and the observance of degree, priority, and place in warfare as in human societies, seems bombastic in the context of the play. Ulysses celebrates these ideas in word but not in act, as seen in his tasteless setup of Cassandra, inviting and then rejecting her kiss. Like Ulysses, the men and women of Troilus and Cressida take pleasure in the human ability “and need” to judge and choose, but then show themselves to be dissatisfied with the results of their judgments and choices because they allow for a world of unclear authority and no absolutes. In 2.2, set at Priam’s palace in Troy, Priam and his sons discuss the merits of returning Helen to the Greeks rather than continuing to wage war against them.

Hector’s mathematical calculation, perhaps an exasperated one after long years of war, is met by Troilus’s disgust, that Hector would weighthe worth and honor of Priam’s kingdom on a scale of common ounces. Troilus rejects reason as an empty tool designed to give men comfort, something to line gloves with, and when Hector gently reminds him, Brother, she is not worth what she doth cost / The keeping, Troilus responds with the play’s central question: What’s aught but as tis valued? Troilus’s question, and his tragic awareness of the emptiness objects take on absent from any desire or esteem, drives the action of Troilus and Cressida, from Achilles sulking in his tents to Cressida’s infidelity with Diomedes and even to Troilus’s pre-consummation apprehension toward his beloved.

When Hector claims that value does not reside in the assessor, but possesses its own estimate and dignity / As well wherein tis precious of itself / As in the prizer, Troilus responds with a strange rhetorical illustration in which one chooses a wife from one’s appetites and desires but then follows through in marriage for his honor. In other words, appetite compels honor through the link between our two types of valuation; we will honor something, that is, value it, because we have once desired it, valued it, in another way. Value does not exist independently of the valuer, as an absolute, because it demands motive, from appetite or from honor, for its livelihood. It is a complicated argument, but in the end comes to this: Helen must be fought for because she was once valued.

Hector loses the argument because he is, like Troilus and Paris whom he reproaches, a young man whom Aristotle thought / Unfit to hear moral philosophy. The Trojans, like the Greeks, want to have it both ways, to be able to desire and to pass judgments of worth, but also to reach after absolutes, to conduct societies and wars based on standards of absolute authority and transparent laws. Thus, though Hector suggests that taking Helen away from her husband is morally questionable, he allows Helen to remain, because the appearance of joint and several dignities must be preserved.

In Act IV of the play, Paris, in a light and philosophical moment, asks Diomedes, Who, in your thoughts, deserves fair Helen best, / Myself or Menelaus. Diomedes responds with perhaps the play’s only clear-minded treatment of the problem of overestimating value in conducting both public and private life. Menelaus, he says, deserves Helen because he seeks her though she has been contaminated, without consideration for pain or cost; Paris deserves her because he still defends her, ignoring his debasement of her and his own debasement through causing the loss of his kin. Both merits poised, says Diomedes, each weighs nor less nor more; / But he as he, the heavier for a whore. Though cynical, it is a fitting sentence in a cynical play, in which Shakespeare gives each man and woman his or her own script “the freedom to value and assess and the freedom to act based on these judgments” and then presents to us the ill-fated result. This is the realization that Pandarus comes to at the end of Troilus and Cressida, when he laments, perhaps in Shakespeare’s voice, Why should our endeavor be so loved, and the performance so loathed?

A problem play is a play in which the playwright portrays the social, political and economic problems of the society he lives in. The problem play is a development form of the ‘drama of ideas’ (Drama of ideas is a type of discussion play in which the most acute problems of social and personal morality is revealed). It is tragic in tone and deals with human dilemmas along with the social evils, i.e., it is a play in which a problem is discussed in all its aspects. The actors in a problem play debate about certain social issues on the stage through the voice of different characters who typically represent conflicting points of view within a realistic social context.It is a form of drama that evolved in the 19th century as part of the wider movement of realism in the arts and human expressions particularly taking after the advancements of Henrik Ibsen. The emphasis in a problem play is on the creation of living characters and plot is based on the fundamental human emotions such as love, anger, jealousy etc. There is an intense emotional disturbance during a violent clash and violent physical action can be seen during clash and conflicts.

In the play Troilus and Cressida, it is found that there is interference of one’s personal relationship with the person’s political duties. For instance, when Cressida is traded to the Greeks, the romance of Troilus and Cressida is opposed. Another example in this matter can be cited that of Achilles, whose decision to not fight the war and his choice of staying with his beloved instead of going to perform his military duties is highly criticized. On the other hand, the irony as well as the politics in all these problems created lies in the fact that the war is fought only because of Paris’ sexual relationship with Helen. These compels the audience to ponder on different questions such that why because of the satisfaction of one couple, all the other relationships in the play have to suffer? Why there is so much pain and suffering among the soldiers who too have relationships, family, children that did no wrong or no evil but will have to die innocent death just because of the happiness of one couple? To describe this situation in a larger sense and in context of a universal social issue, the fight of soldiers and their families’ struggle during the days of war is what the play asks the audience to think upon. The sacrifices of the soldiers which are completely personal are not remembered for long or not respected enough because the ultimate happiness lies in the eyes of the countrymen they fought for, though the soldiers do not know who they are, the people they are fighting for.Thus Troilus and Cressida, in some cases, argues that this conflict of political problem with an individual’s personal life is completely unsporting and inequintable.

At the time the play was written, i.e., the Elizabethan Period, the two genders, male and female were expected to perform according to the roles set by the society for them. To generalize this fact, men were expected to be gallant, brave, excel both at combat and politics and be fierce. To sum up, men were expected to be physically as well as mentally prepared and active. If a man refuses to perform his political or military duties, he would no longer be termed masculine and would be cited as an example of a worthless man. On the other hand, it was completely the other side of a coin for the fair gender. Women were expected to be silent and obedient to their husband and father. They were expected to be chaste. Any women who is involved in transient sexual relationships for feeding her family because she had no other choice, would be considered a whore and was seen as a threat to the society. Also, her disobedience towards her husband or father would lead her to be a disloyal woman, or, in modern words, a tough woman who has lost her principles and can no longer be handled. This difference in the treatment of men and women arises a sense of inequality in the audience’s mind and the portrayal of current social inequalities can also be paralleled with it.

The play, Troilus and Cressida, lacks honor, principles, values and other different ideas such as chivalry and romance. The play sketches a world that is corrupt, miserable and fallen. In this world, the lovers whose romance is said to last forever cheat each other, the leaders of the people manipulate them and lie to them, and the traditional idea of an epic hero is completely erased from the minds of the audience as the heroes are seen behaving and fighting in a not so heroic manner. Nothing can be seen as sacred in this play. The great hero, Achilles, refuses to perform his duties in most time of the war and when he does, he performs deeds that are completely different from what a war hero actually does. He first kills an unarmed soldier and then shamelessly drags his body around the battlefield with his horse. Paris, who steals Helen for his personal pleasures starts the war and then manipulates his soldiers to fight for ‘their’ freedom, even if all the benefits are personal and the soldiers have to die without doing any wrong. Helen, who is considered as the most beautiful woman in the entire universe, is nothing but a cheater. Even Ulysses is a mere hypocrite and cheater in the story and the character of Pandarus is also portrayed in a dark manner since he reduces the love of Troilus and Cressida to mere lust and nothing else. The actions that take place in the battlefield are bad and dishonorable, but the reason of the war is even worse. We are again and again reminded in the play that the major reason of the fight between the Trojans and the Greeks is because Paris stole Helen from the King of the Greeks, Menelaus. And moreover, they fight to keep Helen as a matter of honor in the play. The play states that “all the argument is a cuckold…whore.” To continue in simpler words, the clash that costed countless lives, time and a huge amount of money was all being fought because of one mere relationship. The extreme level of cheat and manipulation by the leaders is what the play basically describes. This opens up different political situations in real life and how politicians, just for their personal satisfaction divide people on the basis of caste and religion. This play makes the audience politically active and aware of the hypocrisy of the society.

The play is basically about a couple, Troilus and Cressida, who fall in love with each other in the seventh year of the long, miserable and horrible Trojan war and the above lines said by Troilus to Pandarus quite describes his love for the woman. When the two fall for each other during the terrible life taking war, they try to make a world of their own where politics, corruption and the ugliness of warfare cannot reach them. However, this doesn’t seem to last too long in the story. This love is brutally torn apart by politics and is limited to mere lust. The play basically seem to inject an idea in the minds of the audience that love cannot escape from the ugliness of the society and its norms and it is impossible to last in such an ugly world. The lesson it gives from such fundamental human emotions like love is praiseworthy. The play is not a tragedy, but the tearing apart of this couple arises pity and sympathy among the minds of the audience.

Greeks and Trojans in the story treat people like they are not humans but mere commodities in the market that can be bought and sold anywhere, anytime. The value given to the emotions of general people in the play seems to be null. Women are seen as sexual objects and nothing else. They act as objects that give babies and are made for fulfilling the sexual pleasures of men. The Trojans talk about Helen in a way as if she is an expensive piece of newly woven dress in the market. Cressida is sold to the Greeks and is treated as a commodity, and the powerful Ajax seems to be a product the Greeks are trying to sell.

Shakespeare, in a way, is trying to make the audience understand the different qualities that decide a person’s worth. The play deals with the judgements of the society that is passed everyday according to our deeds without our interpretation. The play teaches the audience to know one’s worth and refrain oneself from being seen from somebody else’s eyes.

As the play opens, time seems to be running slowly, at the pace of a snail for those who had already spent seven long, tiresome drawn out years in the war. But Shakespeare soon gives his audience the knowledge that time doesn’t just fly, but also destroys everything in its way as the play starts picking up momentum. The characters in the play are seen taking time as their biggest threat as it is inevitable and can play with their existence. Time is depicted as the most powerful element in the play, it is a destructive and unfaithful force that erases lives and is capable of bringing changes in the plot of the story no one would ever think of. Time kills, heals and also gives birth to new lives and stories. The stories of the Trojans and the Greeks, which they thought would be remembered by everyone in the time to come becomes true. Thus Shakespeare describes time as powerful and nobody can escape its claws.

The last, but most probably the major theme in this play is appearance vs reality. Troilus falls with the Cressida he thinks she is, not with the Cressida that she actually is. He choses to idealize Cressida. The character of Pandarus is suspicious in the play as Troilus and Cressida have only the description of themselves as given by Pandarus and that is all they have to go with. Troilus has trust in Cressida and he beliefs that she is never going to shift her loyalties. Troilus finds Cressida beautiful, and it appears to him that beauty comes with loyalty and faithfulness. However, the reality is a bit disappointing for Troilus when he finds out that Cressida betrays him. Troilus is unable to deal with this betrayal and again falls against reality. He beliefs that the woman that betrayed him for Diomedes is not his Cressida, but somebody else. He asks Ulysses to confirm whether she is the one that is going for another man. Troilus says that this is not the woman he fell in love with, this is Diomedes’ Cressida and decides to separate the two Cressidas in his mind for he believes that if beauty comes with a soul, she is not the one he fell for.

This theme gives a major lesson to the audience. The things that we love and fight for may not always be ours, or may not be faithful to us. The different fundamental emotions that the society develops upon losing something or somebody that they lost needs to be stopped and the fact that everything lasts for a certain amount of time must be accepted by people, because that is the ultimate reality of life.

To wrap up the play in a nutshell, I conclude that Troilus and Cressida as a problem play deals with different social issues such as gender inequality, woman in the society, love and its place in the society, basic human emotions such as love, anger, jealousy (as mentioned in the introduction) and the reality of life in depth. Shakespeare is seen succeeding in arising different thoughts in the minds of the audience who can now question certain societal norms. To conclude, the genre of Troilus and Cressida can be fully termed as a problem play because it fulfills all the characteristics required for a play to be one.

In many ways, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure are examples of his ‘problem plays’ that are concerned with self-division and lack of self-knowledge. The former play deals with the duality of the characters and it is in the knowledge or lack of knowledge in this duality between the characters which makes it a problem play. Self-division is also implicit in the latter play, where the characters are forced to confront their different natures due to a crisis which is set upon them. Both the plays, like the innate nature of the problem plays themselves, are torn between how a character perceives himself or herself and how these characters perceive each other differently. Taking this point further, I wish to argue that both plays have a metatheatrical element in them, where my view of each of the individual characters differ from what the characters think of themselves, and that a complex character such as Cressida is actually aware of her mythical identity, whereas other characters, though still just as complex in character, are less aware of their metatheatrical presence and therefore think of their selfdivision as more of an intuition they have. How are Shakespeare’s famous characters to ‘be themselves’ when their names convey an absolute ‘identity’ that is itself based upon a myth of loss? If, even as the ‘original’ heroes of the ‘original’ epics, they always already encode nostalgia?

Charnes’ questioning deals with the ambiguous ideas of dual-identity and self-knowledge that leads to subjectivity in Troilus and Cressida. Although the play is reproduced by Shakespeare, the characters’ identities are historically tied to the original heroes, making Cressida, inevitably, the one to leave Troilus for Diomede. The characters themselves, seem to be functioned to be aware of their own identity to a certain extent although Troilus discovers this much later than Pandarus and Cressida when he sees Cressida with Diomede in the Greek camp. One may already assume, before even watching the play, that Troilus’ identity is to be ‘true’ and Cressida’s to be ‘false’ in their relationship. ‘Identity’ derives from the Latin word ‘idem’, meaning the same, the quality of being identical and the fact of being identical being who or what a person or a thing is. In this sense, Shakespeare and the actors who play the characters are bound to the nature of the play’s historicism: the myth of Troilus and Cressida that has been repeated and multiplied many times have given an ‘identity’ to the characters which subjects the actors to ‘play’ the characters as they are destined to play. It is not only Shakespeare, the audience and the actors who seem to be aware on the subjectivity of these characters. Shakespeare designs Cressida to be self-aware of her own subjectivity.

Shakespeare plays with the word ‘kind’ and ‘unkind’ to show the literal split in her personality but also subtly underlines Cressida’s acknowledgement in her two split identities, where the ‘unkind self’ refers to her unnatural and therefore ‘other’ self. She warns Troilus that one of her self will eventually leave to another, Diomede. Furthermore, she shows distress in her own knowledge of this and therefore claims to be offended by her own company, in this case, her identity. ‘Where is my wit?’ If the definition of wit is the capacity for inventive thought and quick understanding; keen intelligence, then the search for her wit could refer to her searching for knowledge of truth. She must be ‘false’ to Troilus in order to be her ‘true’ self. Nevertheless, Cressida tries to avert herself from her pre-decided identity. ‘You cannot shun yourself’ Troilus speaks that, in context, she cannot leave him from his company but this could also be taken into a wider reading: she cannot avoid herself from her identity and thus has no entitlement to selfhood. ‘Shun’ means to persistently avoid, ignore, or reject through caution, which could be taken as Cressida trying to break through the norms by avoiding or rejecting her identity. She wants to ‘go and try’ to eliminate her subjectivity by erasing her multiplicity from the past Cressida(s) that has- or have- existed before her. By doing so, she would be gaining her selfhood, in which I am referring to the state of having experience of one’s consciousness as belonging to oneself. However, ‘selfhood’ can also mean a person’s character, being egocentric. In this sense, Cressida’s selfhood seems paradoxical. She has a split dual identity, where one part of her wishes to remain with Troilus yet her efforts in trying to avert from her subjectivity and achieve selfhood brings out her other self, which will leave him for another. Despite all of this paradoxical effort in losing herself to gain herself, she ends in a futile resolution. She realises the futility of her efforts for she seems to have self-knowledge of her fate.

As long as she has the ‘wit’ of her subjected fate, she ‘would be gone’. Her role, like Pandarus says, is to ‘Leave all as I found it. / And there an end’, to play and then leave the stage as she has been identified to be. This shows that she is aware of the metatheatricality of the play, and that the Cressida that I see in her as an audience is the same as the Cressida that she sees in herself. Whilst Cressida seems to be aware of her split identity, Troilus is unable to comprehend with her. He says, ‘Well know they what they speak that speak so wisely’, which depicts that Cressida should ‘know’ how she is subject to be gone, without himself knowing what he speaks, making him a character that lacks in self-knowledge as well as his knowledge in Cressida. He is too simple in mind to demystify the truth in her speech: …my integrity and truth to you Might be affronted with the match and weight Of such a winnowed purity in love. How were I then uplifted! But alas, I am as true as truth’s simplicity And simpler than the infancy of the truth. Troilus’ integrity may mean that he has the quality of being honest and true. However, it could also mean that he is in a state of being whole and undivided. Unlike Cressida, he is unaware of his self-divided identity in a metatheatrical sense and perceives his selfhood to be whole to himself. Shakespeare creates a character who is only able to see the truth in simple terms and therefore enables the play to proceed on its subjectivity: Troilus, who is as much of a legendary character as Cressida is, must be betrayed by Cressida. His truth in Cressida is at an infant state in Act two, which only matures later in Act five where he sees her ‘other’ self, with Diomede. This, she? No, this is Diomede’s Cressida. If beauty have a soul, this is not she. The separation of ‘This’; the Cressida that he is seeing, and ‘she’ that he thought Cressida was shows that he is now able to comprehend the division in her identity. His division of Cressida shows that she was subjective to his ideologies: ‘his’ Cressida exists in his mind rather than the external world. He has made the mistake of seeing the truth in simplicity and thus mistaken her for another. Charnes states that ‘to be ‘taken for another’ is not to be taken at all. Rather, it is to be left behind, ‘exchanged’ as it were, for this mysterious ‘other’ for whom one is mis-taken’.

Her comment suggests that Troilus has never truly taken her at all for he was unable to see the ‘other’ side of her identity. Once this truth becomes demystified, Cressida’s role is complete: like all of the other Cressida(s), she has betrayed Troilus. Therefore, she has achieved in fulfilling her role and ‘Leave(s) all as (she) found it, and there an end’ and is seen no more after this scene. Therefore, Shakespeare unveils the fear of identity, self-division and subjectivity by ‘using’ the famous characters and making them lose themselves in order to be themselves. The characters’ identities are identified once more in the play as they carry the weight of their names that convey an absolute ‘identity’ that is itself based upon a myth.

Different criticisms and interpretations of Measure for Measure can be accumulated around the reactions to the central characters in the play: Isabella and the Duke of Vienna. It is difficult to pin down whether these characters are good, bad, powerful, whether they are all or none of these things. Like the inherent nature of problem plays, the characters are problematic in a sense that different characters realise their self-division at different points (some may never realise their self-division) and it is therefore difficult to claim precisely when it is that these characters realise this. On a whole, I agree with Berger’s view of the Duke ‘is less important or interesting that the Duke’s view of the Duke’. What the Duke views of himself is different from my view of the Duke, and this view applies similarly to the other characters as well. Isabella, much like Cressida, has self-knowledge of her identity from an early point in the play. Although Isabella’s status as a nun may make her appear to be a character of intransigent innocence at first, she is actually has a fragile lenience, where she is a virgin but not quite a maid and not yet a nun. Much like her problematic status, problems are also raised in her self-knowledge of division in her identity. She has self that wishes to be free from male patriarchal society, remain a virgin and, therefore, sustain her innocence. However, her other self recognises her part in the patriarchal society: to be a woman in relation to a man. The problem arises from this division between her two selves. Her selfhood that wishes to sustain her innocence becomes paradoxical once she decides to act upon it; from protecting herself of her innocence, she is in recognition of all the things that are not innocent. Therefore, she can no longer be seen as wholly innocent, yet this does not make her guilty of innocence, in a sense that she is still a virgin. Either ways, in realising the dangers of her selfhood from an early point in the play, she is able to find a resolution for it. She finds a way to escape from the corrupted society by choosing to become a nun. Yes, truly. I speak not as desiring more, But rather wishing a more strict restraint Upon the sisterhood In becoming a nun, she will be able to preserve her virginity and therefore her innocence from further corruption. She asks for further privileges to the nun not as a means of desiring for more worldly resources but in a means of asking for a ‘more strict restraint’ in order to restrain herself from losing her ‘self’, her innocence. This emphasises on her knowledge that sisterhood is a place where she can escape from the sexual production system of the patriarchal society.

The Duke, in asking a list of questions on what she is, he makes Mariana prove his point that women are reduced to nothing through her replies being a list of cancellations. It is interesting to see how in some versions of the play, ‘Why, you are nothing then; neither maid, widow, nor wife!’ is written as a statement with an exclamation mark, whereas other versions ‘Why, you are nothing then; neither maid, widow, nor wife?’ end with a questioning. One can read the exclamatory phrase as the Duke making a clear statement of what was perceived of women at that time in Vienna, whilst the phrase that ends with a questioning emphasises on the problem that not all women can be fully defined by his three categories; the Duke is in confusion of where to place Mariana in the patriarchal system. However, Isabella is partly free from this categorising as she has chosen to become a nun. In a Christian narrative, she becomes a daughter of God. The Duke creates multiple identities of himself through theatricality. Theatricality enables the play to end with him remaining as a supposedly good lord. He maintains the ‘appearance’ of a good ruler; whether he truly is a good ruler or not is debatable. For example, he deliberately humbles himself from his social position of a Duke as the friar until his true identity is revealed. He waits until Isabella publicly appears to lose her honour in a convincing way and yet without actually losing it so that when he comes back, he may appear to bring back her honour and therefore bring justice and law back in form. When he does reveal himself as the Duke, Angelo accepts that he has always been watched over by the Duke. O my dread lord, I should be guiltier than my guiltiness To think I can be undiscernible, When I perceive your grace, like power divine, Hath looked upon my passes. In a Christian narrative, the Duke can be seen as God, who sacrifices His son to the human world, watches over His children and gives final judgement on Judgement Day, where The Bible states that God ‘has set a day in which he purposes to judge the inhabited earth’. There is a correlation of God and the Duke’s actions, as the former claims to judge the ‘inhabited earth’, meaning that He will judge the human beings that has populated in Earth, rather than the Earth itself. Similarly, the latter judges the acts that have gone wrong in the play rather than criticising the corrupted state of Viennese society. In this sense, the Duke’s decision in disguising himself as the friar can be seen as a ‘sacrifice’ made in order to be able to retrieve his people from wrongdoings. He becomes a superior omniscient being.

Like God, who is the creator of things, the Duke has created a stage where he lets the problems arise whilst he waits until the problems epitomise the scene before he reveals his true identity. This shows that he is aware of the metatheatricality that derives from his self-duplicity and is also aware of how the others will react to it. Through him, one can see that human beings may not always be what they appear to be. Therefore, to have knowledge of others and in order to be able to govern them, one must first have self-knowledge of oneself. However, the point that has just been made is what the Duke may think of himself to be. Berger argues that what the Duke may think of himself differs from what he views the Duke to be. He argues through Graham Bradshaw’s notion that the Duke is: A negligent governor who now believes that he must confront, but still wants to evade, a problem which he has helped to create…The point that immediately matters is not whether we believe that Vienna requires surgery, but that the Duke himself believes this and feels obliged to act accordingly. It could be argued that Vienna’s precarious state, in terms of justice, is a reflection and therefore a result of his inability to govern the society effectively through a lack of self-knowledge. He sees himself as the role of a good Duke, who needs to act upon the problems that has risen, yet unable to recognise that he has helped to create these problems from the first place. Therefore, Berger names the Duke as a ‘negligent governor’ who is self-divided: a part of him thinks that he must confront these problems and the other part of him wants to evade them.

In conclusion, I have explored how both the plays are torn between how a character perceives himself or herself and how these characters perceive each other differently. Furthermore, some of these characters are aware of the metatheatrical elements and use this understanding as a means of understanding themselves.