SOURCE: “Not Saying No: Female Self-Erasure in Troilus and Cressida,” in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 35, No. 1, Spring, 1993, pp. 44-56.

In the following essay, Tiffany asserts that Cressida has been misread by most critics as either reprehensible or victimized, when in fact she is the product of a patriarchal culture still present today that misunderstands women who do not communicate forcefully.

One half of me is yours, the other half yours, Mine own, I would say; but if mine, then yours, And so all yours. 

—Portia, The Merchant of Venice III.ii.16-18¹

Like Shakespeare's Trojans and Greeks, scholarly evaluators of Shakespeare's Cressida divide themselves into two warring camps that only seem radically opposed. In fact, both camps share a common perspective and language that produce a disturbing vision of woman as passive creation of her patriarchal culture. Cressida as wanton and Cressida as victim present...