Troilus and Cressida

“O, that her hand,

In whose comparison all whites are ink,

Writing their own reproach, to whose soft seizure

The cygnet’s down is harsh and spirit of sense

Hard as the palm of ploughman.”

Troilus’s lines layer on the metaphors and similes to morph the image of Cressida’s soft white hand into a hand that is softer than a swan’s down, since the swan’s soft weathers are a farmer’s calluses compared to the skin of Cressida’s hand. Troilus’s hyperbole suggests that not only is Cressida’s hand white, it is so white other whites are ink in comparison. Troilus’s heavily idealized vision of Cressida reflects his ardent, youthful idealism—an idealism that will be steadily eroded as the play progresses.

“Tell me, Apollo, for thy Daphne’s love,

What Cressid is, what Pandar, and what we?

Her bed is India; there she lies, a pearl:

Between our Ilium and where she resides,

Let it be call’d the wild and wandering flood,

Ourself the merchant, and this sailing Pandar

Our doubtful hope, our convoy and our bark.”

Troilus’s lines illustrate the play’s motif of mercantile imagery (See: Symbols & Motifs), where Cressida’s bed is compared to a rich land where Troilus the merchant must go to seek his fortune. Pandarus, the go-between, is the “bark” or merchant ship that can ferry Troilus to Cressida. The metaphor reflects how important the colonizing enterprise was in Shakespeare’s time, with European sailors looking for fresh, opportune shores. Though Troilus is lovelorn and the speech an expression of his pining for Cressida, the mercantile imagery undercuts the