Isaac Asimov - Asimov’s Guide To Shakespear. Volume 1

But in the course of Agamemnon's cry, however, one significant phrase creeps in:

—Act V, scene v, line 13

Thus, in four words, is masked the most dramatic portion of the Iliad. Achilles, having brutally rejected Agamemnon's offer of amends in Book Nine, forfeits the side of right and must, in his turn, begin to pay.

That payment comes in Book Sixteen, when Patroclus, horror-stricken at the Greek defeat and at the imminent burning of their ships, begs Achilles to let him enter the fight. Achilles agrees. He allows Patroclus to wear Achilles' own armor, but warns him merely to drive the Trojans from the ships and not to attempt to assault the city.

Patroclus does well. The Trojans are driven back, but the excitement of battle causes him to forget Achilles' advice. He pursues the fleeing Trojans, is stopped by Hector, and killed.

Agamemnon's remark that Patroclus is either taken or slain is soon settled in favor of the latter alternative. Nestor enters, saying:

—Act V, scene v, line 17

Again, in a few words, many dramatic deeds in the Iliad are slurred over. In Book Seventeen there is a gigantic struggle over Patroclus' body. Hector manages to strip the dead man of the armor of Achilles, but the Greeks save the body itself in a fight in which Menelaus and Ajax do particularly well. In the Iliad it is Menelaus who sends the message to Achilles, not Nestor, but then it is Nestor's son, Antilochus (who does not appear in Troilus and Cressida) , who actually carries the message.

… Great Achilles Events follow quickly. Ulysses comes onstage, crying:

—Act V, scene v, lines 30-32

So it happens in the Iliad. Achilles, paid back for his intransigence, realizes too late that he has sulked in his tent too long. In the Iliad, however, he doesn't arm so quickly. He has no armor, for he had given it to Patroclus, who had lost it to Hector.

A new set of armor must be forged for Achilles by Vulcan himself, something to which Book Eighteen of the Iliad is devoted. In Book Nineteen there is the formal reconciliation of Agamemnon and Achilles, and only then, in Book Twenty, does Achilles join the battle.

In Books Twenty, Twenty-one, and Twenty-two, Achilles is at war, and none can stand before him. Indeed, in those three books, no Greek warrior but Achilles is mentioned. It is as though he, a single man, fights alone against the Trojans (with occasional help from one god or another) and defeats them.

In Book Twenty-two, when the Trojan army has fled within the walls of Troy in fear of the raging Achilles, Hector at last comes out alone to meet him in the climactic battle of the Iliad. But the issue is never hi doubt.

The onrush of Achilles daunts even Hector, and at the last moment he turns to flee, trying to find his way safe through one of the city gates. Achilles heads him off and three times they run completely round the city (which can only be village-size by modern standards).

Only then does Hector turn, perforce, to face Achilles, and is killed!

None of this can appear in Troilus and Cressida. The medieval poets, with their pro-Trojan/Roman prejudice, had to treat Hector much more gently, and Shakespeare inherits that attitude from them.

He has the two champions fight indeed, but it is Achilles who has to fall back, weakening. Hector says, gallantly,

—Act V, scene vi, line 14

And Achilles goes off, muttering that he is out of practice.

Yet something must be done to account for the fact that Hector does indeed die at the hands of Achilles, so Shakespeare makes the former do a most un-Hectorish thing. Hector meets an unnamed Greek in rich armor and decides he wants it. When the Greek tries to run, Hector calls out:

—Act V, scene vi, lines 30-31

Nowhere in Homer, nor anywhere else in this play, does Hector give anyone reason to think he would ever call a foeman "beast" or take the attitude that war is a hunt, with other men playing the role of animals, and it is partly because of this that some critics doubt that Shakespeare wrote the last act. And yet it is necessary for Hector to do something of this sort, in order that he might earn the retribution that now falls upon him.

Hector catches his prey and kills him. It is late in the day and Hector decides the day's fight is over. Perhaps he is helped to that decision by his eagerness to try on the new armor he has won. At any rate, he takes off his own armor, stands unprotected-and at that moment, Achilles and a contingent of his Myrmidons appear on the scene.

Hector cries out that he is unarmed, but Achilles orders his men to kill, and then says, in grim satisfaction:

—Act V, scene viii, lines 11-12

For Achilles to kill Hector in this way is unthinkable in a Homeric context and must strike any lover of the Iliad as simple sacrilege. But there it is-the medieval pro-Trojan, pro-Hector view.

Troilus bears the news of Hector's death to the Trojan army:

—Act V, scene x, lines 17-19

Niobe was a Theban queen, a daughter of Tantalus (see page I-13), whose pride in her six sons and six daughters led her to boast herself the superior of the goddess Latona (Leto), who had only one of each. La-tona's children, however, happened to be Apollo and Diana.

To avenge the taunt, Apollo and Diana shot down all twelve children, the twelfth in Niobe's arms. She wept continuously after that, day after day, until the gods, in pity, turned her to stone, with a spring of tears still bubbling out and trickling down.

This essentially ends the play. As Troilus says:

—Act V, scene x, line 22

To be sure, Troilus promises revenge on the Greeks and on Achilles particularly, but that is just talk. There can be no revenge. Troy must fall.

Nor has Troilus revenge on Diomedes or Cressida. Diomedes still lives and still has Cressida.

The fifth act is an ending of sorts, but it is not the ending toward which the first four acts were heading.

Shakespeare wrote a narrative poem and three plays set in the legendary days of Greek history. He wrote only one play that was based- in a very tenuous way-in the days of Greece's greatest glory, the fifth century b.c.

This century was the Golden Age of Athens, when she beat off giant Persia and built a naval empire, when she had great leaders like Themis-tocles, Aristides, and Pericles; great dramatists like Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes; great sculptors like Phidias; great scientists like Anaxagoras; great philosophers like Socrates and Plato.