Word, vows, gifts, tears

Elizabethan audiences knew the story of Troilus & Cressida about as well as we know Romeo & Juliet today. It's a star-cross'd love tragedy that just happens to be set during the Trojan War. Way ahead of time, people knew the idiom "True as Troilus, false as Cressid," and while many arguments can be made about Cressida's level of free will regarding her chastity amongst the suffocating haze of testosterone that was ancient Greece and Troy, she does end up at least being false to herself. 

This speech being one case in point. After her uncle Pandarus waxes poetic about how manly and honorable Troilus is, even to the point of degrading the great sexpot Achilles as "a camel," Cressida soliloquizes about being a wise enough woman to resist temptations. Of course, later, when she's with Troilus, she admits to him that she was playing hard to get and wishes she "had men's privilege of speaking first." 

But that's not even the betrayal that makes her eponymous saying true. She is forced to be traded to the Greeks for a prisoner to be released. She really has no choice, but in order for that damned idiom to hold true, this must happen, and the character has no chance of redeeming herself. Thus, she is "False" for going along with the trade that she had no say in whatsoever.

Feminism fail. 

However, this speech still rings true for anyone who ever had ownership of ovaries. Enjoy!

Troilus & Cressida, Act I, Sc. II

Cressida: Words, vows, gifts, tears, and love's full sacrifice,

He offers in another's enterprise;

But more in Troilus thousand fold I see

Than in the glass of Pandar's praise may be;

Yet hold I off. Women are angels, wooing:

Things won are done; joy's soul lies in the doing.

That she beloved knows nought that knows not this:

Men prize the thing ungain'd more than it is:

That she was never yet that ever knew

Love got so sweet as when desire did sue.

Therefore this maxim out of love I teach:

Achievement is command; ungain'd, beseech:

Then though my heart's content firm love doth bear,

Nothing of that shall from mine eyes appear.