Troilus and Cressida
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The History of Troilus and Cressida is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written around 1602, shortly after the completion of Hamlet. It was published in quarto in two separate editions, both in 1609. It is not known whether the play was ever performed in its own time, because the two editions say different things: one announces on the title page that the play had been recently performed on stage; the other claims in a preface that it is a new play that has never been staged.
The play is considered an aberration by many. The Quarto edition labels it a history play, but the First Folio classed it with the tragedies. The play is not a conventional tragedy, since its protagonist does not die, but it does end on a very bleak note with the death of the noble Trojan Hector and destruction of the love between Troilus and Cressida. Throughout, the tone lurches wildly between bawdy comedy and tragic gloom, and it is often difficult to understand how one is meant to respond to the characters.
Synopsis
The play is set during the Trojan War, and essentially has two plots. In one Troilus, a Trojan prince, woos Cressida, has sex with her, and professes never-dying love just before she is traded with the Greeks for a prisoner of war. Trying to visit her in the Greek camp, he sees her with Diomedes, and decides she is a whore.Despite being the titular story, this plot takes up very few scenes: most of the play revolves around a scheme by Nestor and Ulysses to get the prideful Achilles back into battle to fight for the Greeks.
The play ends with a series of battle skirmishes between the two sides, and the death of the Trojan hero Hector.
Sources
The story of Troilus and Cressida is a medieval fable that has no basis in Greek mythology; Shakespeare drew on a number of sources for this plotline, in particular Chaucer's version of the tale, Troilus and Criseyde.The story of the persuasion of Achilles into battle is drawn from Homer's Iliad (perhaps in the translation by George Chapman), and from various medieval and renaissance retellings.
The story was a popular one for dramatists in the early 1600s and Shakespeare may have been inspired by contemporary plays. Thomas Heywood's two-part play The Iron Age also depicts the Trojan war and the story of Troilus and Cressida, but it is not certain whether his or Shakespeare's play was written first. In addition, Thomas Dekker and Henry Chettle wrote a play called Troilus and Cressida at around the same time as Shakespeare, but this play survives only as a fragmentary plot outline.
Reputation
Troilus and Cressida is considered by some to be one of Shakespeare's problem plays, in particular for its disappointing last act. Others consider it an experimental piece that is attempting to break with the conventions of its genre, and consider its baffling characters to be comparable to those in Hamlet. Johann von Goethe called the work Shakespeare's "imagination at its most free."
The play's puzzling and intriguing nature has meant that Troilus and Cressida has rarely been popular on stage and there is no recorded performance between 1734 and 1898. In the Restoration, it was condemned by John Dryden, who called it a "heap of rubbish" and rewrote it. It was also condemned by the Victorians for its explicit sexual references. It was not staged in its original form until the early twentieth century, but since then, it has become increasingly popular due to its cynical depiction of people's immorality and disillusionment especially after the First World War. Its popularity reached a peak in the 1960s when public discontent with the Vietnam War increased exponentially. The play's main overall themes about a long period of war, the cynical breaking of one's public oaths, and the lack of morality among Cressida and the Greeks resonated strongly with a discontented public and led to numerous stagings of this play since it highlighted the gulf between one's ideals and the bleak reality.
Themes and Tropes
- Sex / War
- Thwarted expectations
Adaptation
The story has been adapted as an opera, Troilus and Cressida, by William Walton in 1954.External links
- [The History of Troilus and Cressida] - HTML version of this title.
- [Troilus and Cressida] - plain vanilla text from Project Gutenberg
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