Time and Forgetfulness in Troilus and Cressida

Ulysses delivers a speech that has haunted audiences for four centuries. Time, he says, carries a wallet at his back, filled with “alms for oblivion”—gifts for forgetting. He describes Time as a fickle host who welcomes the new with open arms and coldly ushers out the old. Yesterday’s hero becomes today’s has-been. The speech rings like prophecy because Ulysses is watching it happen in real time. Achilles, who was the Greeks’ supreme warrior, has withdrawn from battle out of pride. Ajax, a much lesser fighter, is now being praised and celebrated simply because he is willing to act. The play is not interested in whether Ajax is truly better than Achilles. It only cares that novelty, motion, and present visibility matter more than past accomplishment.

Early in the play, Troilus and Cressida make eternal vows. They speak in the language of permanence: their names will live forever in the mouths of lovers yet unborn. “As true as Troilus” will become a phrase spoken across centuries. But the play moves relentlessly forward, and this future never arrives. Instead, Cressida’s name becomes famous for the opposite reason—for falsehood, not fidelity. What was meant to crown the verse ends up defining it through betrayal. Time does not preserve their love. It consumes it and replaces it with its opposite. The vow that seemed to transcend time becomes merely time’s instrument, proof of how thoroughly memory can be inverted.

The war itself is evidence of Time’s tyranny. Seven years of fighting have accomplished nothing. Troy still stands. The Greeks still camp outside. Yet no one can stop. The initial cause—Helen—is openly acknowledged as trivial. Hector argues that she is “not worth what she doth cost / The holding.” But the play cannot end because it has already begun. Reputations are at stake. Armies are mobilized. The machinery of conflict, once started, runs forward regardless of whether anyone still believes in the reason for it. Cassandra sees the future and warns repeatedly that Troy will fall. No one listens. Her prophecies have no power against momentum.

By the final scenes, the play has become a study in how little control anyone has over their own meaning. Hector fights on the battlefield, knowing the war is pointless, because his honor demands it. He is killed by Achilles, who surrounds him with hired mercenaries and murders him while he is unarmed. The death is inglorious, unmemorable in its cruelty. Yet “Hector the great” will live in memory—not as he actually was, but as legend requires. Troilus will become famous for faithfulness he never lived to prove, Cressida for falsehood that was partly circumstance. Time does not preserve truth. It preserves only what is repeated, what survives in the mouths of those who come after. The play ends not with resolution but with the understanding that everyone in it will be remembered as types—the true lover, the false woman, the noble warrior—rather than as the complicated, contradictory people they actually were.