It behoves me no doubt, after my last blog, to give an example of the way any moment in Shakespeare might open like a flower, calling for dedicated appreciation and attention, offering its own very singular pleasures.
So let’s, please, look at one of Troilus’s speeches from Troilus and Cressida:
I am giddy; expectation whirls me round.
Th’imaginary relish is so sweet
That it enchants my sense: what will it be,
When that the wat’ry palate tastes indeed
Love’s thrice repuréd nectar? Death, I fear me,
Swooning destruction, or some joy too fine,
Too subtle-potent, tuned too sharp in sweetness,
For the capacity of my ruder powers;
I fear it much, and I do fear besides,
That I shall lose distinction in my joys,
As doth a battle, when they charge on heaps
The enemy flying. (3. 2. 15-26)
Troilus in current criticism is typically considered self-centred, immature, clearly not up to the love he proclaims and, in the end, a rather nasty misogynist. Indeed, this particular speech has been seen as nauseously pre-erotic. But we were all young once—some people still are—and such judgments can too easily preclude engagement, or excuse neglect.
If we just allow it, instead of writing it off because of his later caddishness or our own sexual experience, what Troilus says seems to me absorbing, even revelatory.
For sexual fantasy here is an opening to all the peril and pleasure of the sublime!
No wonder Troilus fears he may not be equal to sex, for he expects it will put at risk his very being and identity, and that he might not survive it.
Of course one wants to say, ‘Calm down, dear’; or wearily with Prospero, ‘’tis new to thee’. But Troilus’s tremulous susceptibility is also rather wonderful.
And his apprehensions may reveal sex in ways in which a more seasoned sexuality will not. For aren’t we all of us always—except in rare moments of satisfaction which the Elizabethans had reason for calling ‘a little death’—somewhere on the curve before sexual fulfillment?
So sex itself may be foreplay to the sublime.
And untested fantasy may take us beyond sex into the fearful and exciting thing it aims at.
Then there’s the overdetermined density of that final image, after Troilus says, ‘I shall lose distinction in my joys’:
As doth a battle, when they charge on heaps
The enemy flying.
Hmm. … This intimates a more bitter and humiliating sort of self-loss yet somehow sounds attractively ugly. ‘As doth a battle, when they charge on heaps’ suggests to me bayoneting pillows. But then the heaps are corpses, aren’t they? But whose? Ours or the enemy’s? The syntax will not tell. Are we flying the enemy, or is it that the enemy is fleeing us? And how, anyway, is all this to be mapped onto an imagined sexual encounter? The ungainly disorientation, missing the target, the stuttering compression: perhaps it mixes existential risk with the specter of premature ejaculation? It’s not quite possible to decide, presumably because Troilus doesn’t quite know himself what he wants or fears. But isn’t experience often ultimately like that, even to the one experiencing it? And doesn’t Shakespeare at his best take us beyond easily shareable communication and ready-made formulae into an inimitable withinness?
Into Shakespearience, perhaps. Or one lively particle of it.
What do you think?
(Oh, and next time I think we’ll look into a female character’s fantasies: fair’s fair.)
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