Aeneas tells Troilus that Paris has been wounded in a duel with Menelaus. (Such a duel is described in Book Three of the Iliad and it is after that duel, which Menelaus wins, that a truce is negotiated, a truce which is broken by Pandarus' arrow-see page I-79).
Troilus shrugs it off:
Let Paris bleed; 'tis but a scar to scorn:
Paris is gored with Menelaus' horn.
- Act I, scene i, lines 115-16
There was an accepted convention in Shakespearean England that a betrayed husband had horns; invisible ones, of course. This may be from a consideration of the sexual life of the polygamous stags, who fight each other for the possession of a harem of does. The deceived husband is, perhaps, likened to a defeated stag; hence his horns.
The husband whose wife had fooled him was universally viewed with amused contempt in Shakespeare's time. This attitude arose, perhaps, from the conventions of courtly love, (see page I-54) where the knight was, ideally, supposed to love the wife of another. In all such tales, the husband was the villain (witness the well-known romance of Tristan and Iseult) and the audience cheered when the horns were, so to speak, placed on his forehead.
The betrayed husband was therefore an inexhaustible theme for comedy and any mention of horns or horned animals, even any reference to foreheads, was the signal for laughter-and Shakespeare made the most of that.
Thus it is that Troilus scorns poor wronged Menelaus. To modern ears, which do not find adultery either as serious or as comic as the Elizabethans did, such jests fall flat.
Queen Hecuba ...
The scene shifts to Cressida now. She enters with her servant, Alexander, looking after two women who have hastened by. She inquires who those were who passed and Alexander answers:
Queen Hecuba and Helen.
- Act I, scene ii, line 1b
Queen Hecuba (or Hecabe, in the Greek form) was the second wife of Priam. She bore him nineteen of his sixty-two children, including Hector, Paris, Troilus, and Cassandra of those mentioned so far. Because of her sufferings, she was a favorite character in tragic dramas devoted to the Trojan War and, indeed, in Hamlet Shakespeare makes use of this fact indirectly (see page II-115). Here, in Troilus and Cressida, however, she never appears onstage.
He chid Andromache ...
Apparently the two women are hastening to the walls to see the battle, for they fear it may be going poorly. After all, even Hector is perturbed, or as the servant says:
Hector, whose patience Is as a virtue fixed, today was moved.
He chid Andromache, and struck his armorer,
- Act I, scene ii, lines 4-6
Andromache is Hector's wife. The last part of Book Six of the Iliad is devoted to a scene in which she hurries with her infant son, Scamandrius, to meet Hector before he leaves the city on his way to the battle. It is the most touching scene of married love in Homer. Andromache pleads with Hector to stay in the city, for all her own relatives are dead. "So, dear Hector," she says, "you are now not merely my husband-you are father, mother, and brother, too!"
But Hector must go and he reaches out his arms to give his son a farewell and to pray over him, hoping that someday the child's feats will be such that all will agree that "His father was the lesser man!" Alas, it was not to be, for Hector's son was killed when Troy was destroyed.
A lord of Troyan blood.,.
To make Hector scold Andromache, something most unusual must have happened. Cressida asks what that might be and is told:
... there is among the Greeks
A lord of Troyan blood, nephew to Hector;
They call him Ajax.
- Act I, scene ii, lines 12-14
Ajax plays a great role in the Iliad. He is one of two men in the epic that bears the name. Since the one here referred to is particularly large, he is called "Ajax the Greater." Of the two, only "the Greater" appears in Troilus and Cressida, so it suffices to call him Ajax.
In the Iliad Ajax is the strongest of the Greeks, save only for Achilles, but is considerably more renowned for his strength than for his subtlety. He is never wounded in the Iliad, and he is the only important hero who never at any time personally receives the help of a god or a goddess. He is the epitome of success through hard work, without inspiration.
He is not, in the Iliad, of Trojan blood; nor is he a nephew to