I’ve been waiting for Noah Millman, my
Shakepeare Guy, to enter the lists. Here he comes:
“(1) The whole scene is part of a strategy Ulysses devises to get Achilles
back into combat. The speech, then, is a *calculated* piece of rhetoric, not
an expression of Ulysses’ – much less Shakespeare’s – feeling. That
strategy, of course, fails. Indeed, *every* strategy Ulysses proposes in
Troilus & Cressida fails. What does that say about how we are to take this
speech – purportedly ‘one of the greatest in world literature’? I don’t
think we are to take it at face value. An analogy: the phrase, ’some are
born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon
them’ is also frequently quoted without irony. But the phrase comes from a
letter written to trick Malvolio into making a great ass of himself; the
writer was not only insincere, but contrived the phrase specifically to
appeal to a self-infatuated fool. Another analogy: ‘discretion is the better
part of valor’ – where’s that from? From a speech by Falstaff – ‘the better
part of valor is discretion, in the which better part I have saved my life.’
Falstaff is a notorious coward, and this is part of a speech in defense not
of courage tempered by prudence but of outright cowardice. It’s sophistry –
brilliant sophistry, by a most sympathetic rogue, but sophistry nonetheless.
So, too, with all of Ulysses’ speeches in Troilus: they are impressive feats
of rhetoric, and have often been taken as statements of authorial sentiment.
But the play will not support this interpretation, for Ulysses’ character
spends the entire play devising strategems, using his vaunted cunning to try
to effect an outcome that he cannot achieve forthrightly – and he always
fails. He is not a hero in the piece (if there is a hero). Finally, this
should be no surprise, as the English identified with the Trojans (Aeneas
had purportedly gone on to found Britain) not the Greeks, and Ulysses
specifically had long since been reinterpreted as the type of a man of
’policy’ rather than a man of forthright action – a Machiavel, a Dick Morris
type. It would be very surprising for Shakespeare to use him as a mouthpiece
for lofty sentiment that he wished to endorse.
“(2) ‘Nature’ has many meanings in Shakespeare, some of them mutually
contradictory. See for example, the extraordinary variety of uses of the
word in King Lear, where Lear’s use of the word suggests a meaning almost
precisely opposite to the meaning suggested when used by Edmund. ‘Nature’ in
this case means something like ‘virtue’ or ‘worth’ and the phrase, ‘one
touch of nature makes the whole world kin’ means simply that all you need is
a *touch* of nature for everyone to want to call himself your cousin. The
apposite image is the crowd choosing gilt-covered dust to dust-covered gold.
A ‘touch’ – a little gilding – is all it takes for everyone to rush to
associate with you, whereas only a thin coating of dust – the effect of the
passage of time – is all it takes for everyone to forget that there’s gold
underneath. Your correspondent who says, ‘in *this* – this self-destructive
and cyclical process – we are “all made kin”‘ is making too much of the
phrase. Shakespeare is *not saying* that everyone is kin – not because we
all share a ‘touch of nature’ nor because we are all decadent and
superficial. Rather, he’s just saying that ‘everyone wants to be cousin to
the guy who’s successful today.’
“—Noah”