Troilus and Cressida

This is the last text, chronologically, in the class I read it for, but it was the easiest to get hold of. I actually read a version with no notes or glosses, so it'll probably be interesting to go through an annotated version. Obviously I was aware of the story on the Trojan War -- unavoidable when you take Classics for GCSE and A Level -- but I didn't know much about this one.

People are right to categorise this as a 'problem play'. It generally doesn't work to try and put things into hard and fast categories -- just look at the problems with Anglo-Saxon elegies/lyric poems -- but it can be useful. But this one defies all the categories: comedy? Tragedy? History...? None of that seems quite right.

It's Shakespeare, though, so it's bound to be worth reading. I'm looking forward to meeting Shakespeare's sources, and getting to know them better. (I am generally against studying Shakespeare and Chaucer, in my own work, as I feel they're... overdone. Maybe even over stressed, though it's hard to overestimate Shakespeare's impact. Still, I'm very excited about this module.) ( )

Ordinarily I wouldn't reread a book or play, even one I read for class, so soon after reading it for the first time, but with Shakespeare (and indeed Chaucer) I think it's necessary. Plus, this edition came with notes, which are very extensive and -- even though I need no help with the language in general -- help to shed light on puns, double entendres, and potential confused transmission of the plays, etc. It has an extensive introduction which covers a lot of different aspects of the play, too.

I was reading this time specifically for Cressida's character, and for the play's relationship to Chaucer's version. She's at once more brazen -- deliberately stating that she's holding out on Troilus, because he won't want her as much once he's won her -- and more pitiable in the conclusion, in her pathetic little fight with Diomede over the belt. She came alive for me in that scene, in her pleading.

I noticed, though, that this is much less involved with the couple than Chaucer's version. There's whole sections set in the Greek camp, which you don't see in Chaucer. Shakespeare's more interested in the war as a whole than Chaucer, it seems -- or maybe the war as a whole sheds light on Troilus and Cressida? I wonder. The repeated references to Helen and her falseness do throw a shadow over Cressida. ( )

Rereading again. I think I like it more each time I reread it, though I would like to stop having to right about now. Again, this time I read for the character of Cressida, and skipped most of the rest. Mostly I noticed that I didn't have that much to read; Chaucer and Dryden both give her a much bigger part. And yet I still don't quite know what to do with her: she's much more brazen than Chaucer's Criseyde, but aren't her fears valid? Troilus does treat her less well once he's had her. ( )

One of Shakespeare's most notoriously difficult and cynical plays, labelled a "Problem Comedy", Troilus and Cressida has perplexed critics and theatre directors, and after Shakespeare's lifetime it was not performed again until 1907. In many ways the play's difficulty is a surprise; the story of Troilus and Cressida was a popular theme, drawn from Homer's Iliad and Chaucer's own Troilus and Criseyde, as was its classical setting, the Greek siege of Troy, led by Agamemnon, Achilles, Ajax, Diomedes and Ulysses. Within the walls of Troy, Prince Troilus falls madly in love with Cressida, daughter of the deserter Calchas. His love is intense and frenetic--"I am giddy, expectation whirls round me," but turns to bitter disillusion when Cressida defects to the Greek camp and flirts with Diomedes. As the war and conflict over the abduction of Helen whirls around the doomed romance, the play delights in its complex syntax and cynical images of waste, decay, corruption and mutability, summed up in Ulysses' comment that, "Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all / To envious and calumniating time." The play's cynical open-ended quality has frustrated many readers, but gives the play a remarkably modern, contemporary sensibility. --Jerry Brotton

The introduction to this edition of 'Troilus and Cressida' places it in its late Elizabethan context, examines and assimilates the wide variety of critical responses the play has elicited, and argues its importance in the context of late 20th-century culture as an experimental and open-ended work.rrOne of Shakespeare's most notoriously difficult and cynical plays, labelled a "Problem Comedy", Troilus and Cressida has perplexed critics and theatre directors, and after Shakespeare's lifetime it was not performed again until 1907. In many ways the play's difficulty is a surprise; the story of Troilus and Cressida was a popular theme, drawn from Homer's Iliad and Chaucer's own Troilus and Criseyde, as was its classical setting, the Greek siege of Troy, led by Agamemnon, Achilles, Ajax, Diomedes and Ulysses. Within the walls of Troy, Prince Troilus falls madly in love with Cressida, daughter of the deserter Calchas. His love is intense and frenetic--"I am giddy, expectation whirls round me," but turns to bitter disillusion when Cressida defects to the Greek camp and flirts with Diomedes. As the war and conflict over the abduction of Helen whirls around the doomed romance, the play delights in its complex syntax and cynical images of waste, decay, corruption and mutability, summed up in Ulysses' comment that, "Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all / To envious and calumniating time." The play's cynical open-ended quality has frustrated many readers, but gives the play a remarkably modern, contemporary sensibility. --Jerry Brotton