Re-reading of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida through Bill Brown’s ‘Thing Theory’
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Bill Brown’s ‘Thing Theory,’ which has generated a variety of scholarly analysis of objects as a catalyst for change in subject/object relation, has influenced my approach to Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. This study thus attempts to employ Brown’s theory to read literary and theatrical objects in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida as a test case. For this purpose, I have focused specifically on Troilus’s sleeve. In Act 4, Scene 4 we see that Troilus’s sleeve (object) is given to his lover Cressida as a love token and then it is taken away to his hated rival Diomedes. Throughout this transaction, we witness that Troilus’s mere sleeve (we finds the ‘thingness’ of the sleeve at the moment of its separation from Troilus) causes the protagonist’s mental breakdown. However when the sleeve’s attachment to the top of Diomedes’s helmet, it transforms itself from a thing to an object, creating a new meaning. From this very moment of a tragic ending we witness “how inanimate objects,” as Brown asserts, “constitute human subjects” (“Thing Theory” 7). Brown’s methodological fetishism with which he uses to engage with the question of things and their thingness may explain Shakespeare’s use of a male sleeve in the play with a special purpose of disclosing phenomenal and psychoanalytical thinking. It will become more clear when we consider Troilus’s sleeve is not a detachable piece of garment-which is usually taken for granted-but an armoured part. Although this consideration remains a matter for conjecture, there is no reason why we should not consider it as an armoured part. In this present study I wish to conclude that this kind of analyses not only offers us a new way to read Shakespeare’s plays, but also helps us to understand change in our posthuman academic discourses.
Abstract
Bill Brown’s ‘Thing Theory,’ which has generated a variety of scholarly analysis of objects as a catalyst for change in subject/object relation, has influenced my approach to Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. This study thus attempts to employ Brown’s theory to read literary and theatrical objects in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida as a test case. For this purpose, I have focused specifically on Troilus’s sleeve. In Act 4, Scene 4 we see that Troilus’s sleeve (object) is given to his lover Cressida as a love token and then it is taken away to his hated rival Diomedes. Throughout this transaction, we witness that Troilus’s mere sleeve (we finds the ‘thingness’ of the sleeve at the moment of its separation from Troilus) causes the protagonist’s mental breakdown. However when the sleeve’s attachment to the top of Diomedes’s helmet, it transforms itself from a thing to an object, creating a new meaning. From this very moment of a tragic ending we witness “how inanimate objects,” as Brown asserts, “constitute human subjects” (“Thing Theory” 7). Brown’s methodological fetishism with which he uses to engage with the question of things and their thingness may explain Shakespeare’s use of a male sleeve in the play with a special purpose of disclosing phenomenal and psychoanalytical thinking. It will become more clear when we consider Troilus’s sleeve is not a detachable piece of garment-which is usually taken for granted-but an armoured part. Although this consideration remains a matter for conjecture, there is no reason why we should not consider it as an armoured part. In this present study I wish to conclude that this kind of analyses not only offers us a new way to read Shakespeare’s plays, but also helps us to understand change in our posthuman academic discourses.
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