Act 5, Scene 3

Troy. Before PRIAM'S palace

[Enter HECTOR and ANDROMACHE.]
Andromache
3049 When was my lord so much ungently temper'd
3050 To stop his ears against admonishment?
3051 Unarm, unarm, and do not fight to-day.
Hector
3052 You train me to offend you; get you in.
3053 By all the everlasting gods, I'll go.
Andromache
3054 My dreams will, sure, prove ominous to the day.
Hector
3055 No more, I say.
[Enter CASSANDRA.]
Cassandra
3056 Where is my brother Hector?
Andromache
3057 Here, sister, arm'd, and bloody in intent.
3058 Consort with me in loud and dear petition,
3059 Pursue we him on knees; for I have dreamt
3060 Of bloody turbulence, and this whole night
3061 Hath nothing been but shapes and forms of slaughter.
Cassandra
3062 O, 'tis true!
Hector
3063 Ho! bid my trumpet sound.
Cassandra
3064 No notes of sally, for the heavens, sweet brother!
Hector
3065 Be gone, I say. The gods have heard me swear.
Cassandra
3066 The gods are deaf to hot and peevish vows;
3067 They are polluted off'rings, more abhorr'd
3068 Than spotted livers in the sacrifice.
Andromache
3069 O, be persuaded! Do not count it holy
3070 To hurt by being just. It is as lawful,
3071 For we would give much, to use violent thefts
3072 And rob in the behalf of charity.
Cassandra
3073 It is the purpose that makes strong the vow;
3074 But vows to every purpose must not hold.
3075 Unarm, sweet Hector.
Hector
3076 Hold you still, I say.
3077 Mine honour keeps the weather of my fate.
3078 Life every man holds dear; but the dear man
3079 Holds honour far more precious dear than life.
[Enter TROILUS.]
Hector
3080 How now, young man! Mean'st thou to fight to-day?
Andromache
3081 Cassandra, call my father to persuade.
[Exit CASSANDRA.]
Hector
3082 No, faith, young Troilus; doff thy harness, youth;
3083 I am to-day i' the vein of chivalry.
3084 Let grow thy sinews till their knots be strong,
3085 And tempt not yet the brushes of the war.
3086 Unarm thee, go; and doubt thou not, brave boy,
3087 I'll stand to-day for thee and me and Troy.
Troilus
3088 Brother, you have a vice of mercy in you
3089 Which better fits a lion than a man.
Hector
3090 What vice is that, good Troilus?
3091 Chide me for it.
Troilus
3092 When many times the captive Grecian falls,
3093 Even in the fan and wind of your fair sword,
3094 You bid them rise and live.
Hector
3095 O, 'tis fair play!
Troilus
3096 Fool's play, by heaven, Hector.
Hector
3097 How now! how now!
Troilus
3098 For th' love of all the gods,
3099 Let's leave the hermit Pity with our mothers;
3100 And when we have our armours buckled on,
3101 The venom'd vengeance ride upon our swords,
3102 Spur them to ruthful work, rein them from ruth!
Hector
3103 Fie, savage, fie!
Troilus
3104 Hector, then 'tis wars.
Hector
3105 Troilus, I would not have you fight to-day.
Troilus
3106 Who should withhold me?
3107 Not fate, obedience, nor the hand of Mars
3108 Beckoning with fiery truncheon my retire;
3109 Not Priamus and Hecuba on knees,
3110 Their eyes o'ergalled with recourse of tears;
3111 Nor you, my brother, with your true sword drawn,
3112 Oppos'd to hinder me, should stop my way,
3113 But by my ruin.
[Re-enter CASSANDRA, with PRIAM.]
Cassandra
3114 Lay hold upon him, Priam, hold him fast;
3115 He is thy crutch; now if thou lose thy stay,
3116 Thou on him leaning, and all Troy on thee,
3117 Fall all together.
Priam
3118 Come, Hector, come, go back.
3119 Thy wife hath dreamt; thy mother hath had visions;
3120 Cassandra doth foresee; and I myself
3121 Am like a prophet suddenly enrapt
3122 To tell thee that this day is ominous.
3123 Therefore, come back.
Hector
3124 Aeneas is a-field;
3125 And I do stand engag'd to many Greeks,
3126 Even in the faith of valour, to appear
3127 This morning to them.
Priam
3128 Ay, but thou shalt not go.
Hector
3129 I must not break my faith.
3130 You know me dutiful; therefore, dear sir,
3131 Let me not shame respect; but give me leave
3132 To take that course by your consent and voice
3133 Which you do here forbid me, royal Priam.
Cassandra
3134 O Priam, yield not to him!
Andromache
3135 Do not, dear father.
Hector
3136 Andromache, I am offended with you.
3137 Upon the love you bear me, get you in.
[Exit ANDROMACHE.]
Troilus
3138 This foolish, dreaming, superstitious girl
3139 Makes all these bodements.
Cassandra
3140 O, farewell, dear Hector!
3141 Look how thou diest. Look how thy eye turns pale.
3142 Look how thy wounds do bleed at many vents.
3143 Hark how Troy roars; how Hecuba cries out;
3144 How poor Andromache shrills her dolours forth;
3145 Behold distraction, frenzy, and amazement,
3146 Like witless antics, one another meet,
3147 And all cry, Hector! Hector's dead! O Hector!
Troilus
3148 Away, away!
Cassandra
3149 Farewell! yet, soft! Hector, I take my leave.
3150 Thou dost thyself and all our Troy deceive.
[Exit.]
Hector
3151 You are amaz'd, my liege, at her exclaim.
3152 Go in, and cheer the town; we'll forth, and fight,
3153 Do deeds worth praise and tell you them at night.
Priam
3154 Farewell. The gods with safety stand about thee!
[Exeunt severally PRIAM and HECTOR. Alarums.]
Troilus
3155 They are at it, hark! Proud Diomed, believe,
3156 I come to lose my arm or win my sleeve.
[Enter PANDARUS.]
Pandarus
3157 Do you hear, my lord? Do you hear?
Troilus
3158 What now?
Pandarus
3159 Here's a letter come from yond poor girl.
Troilus
3160 Let me read.
Pandarus
3161 A whoreson tisick, a whoreson rascally tisick so troubles
3162 me, and the foolish fortune of this girl, and what one thing,
3163 what another, that I shall leave you one o' these days; and I
3164 have a rheum in mine eyes too, and such an ache in my bones that
3165 unless a man were curs'd I cannot tell what to think on't. What
3166 says she there?
Troilus
3167 Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart;
3168 Th' effect doth operate another way.
[Tearing the letter.]
Troilus
3169 Go, wind, to wind, there turn and change together.
3170 My love with words and errors still she feeds,
3171 But edifies another with her deeds.
[Exeunt severally.]

Reading mode

Word definitions on hover

Notes

TLN 3049archaic vocab
“ungently temper'd To stop his ears against admonishment”
'Ungently temper'd' means in an ungentlemanly or harsh mood — 'temper' here is a person's habitual disposition, not a sudden outburst. Andromache opens the scene by lamenting that Hector has become unusually resistant to reasonable counsel ('admonishment') on this particular morning.
TLN 3054historical topical
“My dreams will, sure, prove ominous to the day”
Prophetic dreams warning of disaster were taken seriously in both classical antiquity and Shakespeare's England as genuine communications from the gods or from God. Andromache's ominous dream is a stock feature of the Trojan-war tradition — both Homer and the later medieval retellings surround Hector's last day with ill omens that he ignores.
classical The Greek and Trojan heroes
TLN 3066historical topical
“The gods are deaf to hot and peevish vows; They are polluted off'rings, more abhorr'd Than spotted livers in the sacrifice”
Cassandra argues that a vow made in passionate haste ('hot and peevish') is itself impious — an unworthy sacrifice the gods reject. 'Spotted livers' refers to Roman and Greek divination: priests examined the liver of a sacrificed animal for blemishes; a diseased or spotted liver signalled that the offering was rejected and the enterprise would fail. Her point is that Hector's vow to fight is no less polluted than a defective victim.
TLN 3077rhetorical device
“Mine honour keeps the weather of my fate. Life every man holds dear; but the dear man Holds honour far more precious dear than life”
'Keeps the weather' is a nautical metaphor meaning to hold the windward (safer, advantageous) position — Hector claims his honour stands above his fate, commanding it rather than being driven by it. The three lines then build a chiasmus: 'dear... dear man... precious dear,' pivoting on the word 'dear' to distinguish the value men place on life from the greater value the truly honourable man places on reputation. The speech crystallises the play's central — and ultimately fatal — equation of honour with death.
classical The Greek and Trojan heroes
TLN 3088historical topical
“you have a vice of mercy in you Which better fits a lion than a man”
Troilus accuses Hector of a 'vice of mercy' — an excessive, almost animal-like clemency. The lion was proverbially considered magnanimous to a fallen enemy; classical and medieval sources held that a lion would not strike a prostrate foe. Troilus's twist is that such noble restraint is appropriate to a beast by nature, but not to a soldier in a war that demands ruthlessness.
TLN 3107classical allusion
“Not fate, obedience, nor the hand of Mars Beckoning with fiery truncheon my retire”
Mars was the Roman god of war, imagined wearing armour and carrying a staff of command. A 'truncheon' is a short baton or staff of authority used by commanders; 'fiery' signals divine, supernatural force. Troilus swears that not even the war-god himself, waving him off the field with a burning commander's baton, could stop him from fighting.
TLN 3115rhetorical device
“He is thy crutch; now if thou lose thy stay, Thou on him leaning, and all Troy on thee, Fall all together”
Cassandra constructs a chain of dependency — Priam leans on Hector as on a crutch, Troy leans on Priam — that produces a single catastrophic collapse if Hector is removed. The image turns the political fact (Troy's survival depends on its greatest warrior) into a physical figure of bodies propping each other up, then all falling together. This is also a structural echo of the 'degree' speech: the play's great chain of being, if one link breaks, brings everything down.
historical The great chain of being (order and degree)
TLN 3138historical topical
“This foolish, dreaming, superstitious girl Makes all these bodements”
Troilus dismisses Cassandra as a hysterical girl producing empty omens ('bodements' = forebodings, omen-signs). The play's bitter irony is that Cassandra is right about everything and Troilus is wrong about everything: she is the only truth-teller on stage in this scene. Her curse — to prophesy truly but never be believed — comes from Greek mythology, and Troilus here enacts it.
TLN 3155historical topical
“Proud Diomed, believe, I come to lose my arm or win my sleeve”
A 'sleeve' was the standard love-token a lady gave her knight to wear in battle or tournament — Cressida gave Troilus her sleeve when they parted, and in 5.2 Troilus watched Cressida hand it over to Diomedes. To 'win my sleeve' means to take it back from Diomedes by killing or defeating him. The rhyming couplet frames Troilus's grief as a chivalric quest of vengeance, but the loss he also accepts ('lose my arm') makes it a death-wish as much as a war-cry.
historical Cressida and the 'false woman' tradition
TLN 3161archaic vocab
“A whoreson tisick, a whoreson rascally tisick so troubles me”
'Tisick' (also 'phthisic') is an archaic word for a chest disease, most likely tuberculosis or a chronic cough and wasting illness. 'Whoreson' is a general-purpose intensifier and insult in Elizabethan English, literally 'son of a whore.' Pandarus's complaint that his disease is ruining him connects to the play's wider imagery of contagion and decay — and to the tradition that Pandarus ends the story diseased, his body the physical emblem of the corruption his go-between role has spread.
historical Pandarus and the word 'pander'
TLN 3167rhetorical device
“Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart; Th' effect doth operate another way. Go, wind, to wind, there turn and change together. My love with words and errors still she feeds, But edifies another with her deeds”
Troilus tears Cressida's letter and dismisses it as empty language divorced from action — 'words, words, mere words' versus 'deeds.' The letter is all wind (empty breath); 'Go, wind, to wind' is his contemptuous disposal of it, sending Cressida's words back into the insubstantial air they came from. The closing couplet turns on the contrast between 'words and errors' (false promises and mistakes) and 'deeds' (sexual acts with Diomedes), which 'edifies' — builds up, gives something real — Diomedes while Troilus gets only text.
historical Cressida and the 'false woman' traditionhistorical A woman's honour: chastity and the double standard