Troilus and Cressida

• 1. Introduction

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  Troilus and Cressida, written by William Shakespeare probably in 1602, arrives with a strange and unsettling preface. One printing of the 1609 quarto announces it as a play recently performed on stage. The other printing declares it a new play that has never been staged, "never staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar." Two editions of the same play, published in the same year, contradicting each other about whether an audience had ever seen it. That puzzle points to something deeper: this is a work that has never quite fit anywhere. The Quarto called it a history. The First Folio placed it among the tragedies, yet its pages are unnumbered, its title missing from the Table of Contents, and it was apparently squeezed into the volume wherever space allowed. The critic Frederick S. Boas eventually gave up trying to classify it at all and invented an entirely new category: the problem play. What kind of Shakespeare play refuses to be a comedy, refuses to be a tragedy, mocks its own heroes, and ends without resolving its war, its love affair, or its moral questions? The answer is the one set in Troy.

• 2. Two Plots, One Play

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  The play follows two distinct lines of action that share a setting but almost nothing else. Troilus, a son of King Priam of Troy, is in love with Cressida. Her uncle Pandarus engineers their meeting, and the two lovers spend a night together and pledge eternal faithfulness. When Cressida's father Calchas, a Trojan priest who has defected to the Greek side, arranges an exchange, Cressida is traded for the Trojan commander Antenor. Troilus watches from hiding as Diomedes, the Greek officer who escorted Cressida to the camp, woos her and receives from her the sleeve Troilus had given as a love-token. The love plot ends in betrayal and rage, with Troilus vowing to kill Diomedes on the battlefield. Meanwhile, the Greeks have a different problem. Achilles refuses to fight, lounging in his tent while his companion Patroclus mocks the Greek commanders. Ulysses devises a scheme: choose Ajax as champion for Hector's single-combat challenge, lavish Ajax with praise, and hope the snub to Achilles' pride pulls him back to the fight. It works only partly, and only when Patroclus is killed. Achilles then has his Myrmidons surround the unarmed Hector and stab him to death. The play ends not with triumph but with Troilus delivering the news of Hector's death to the Trojans, and with the wretched Pandarus left on stage wondering why he is so abused.

• 3. A Medieval Love Story in a Greek War

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  The Trojan War itself is ancient material, drawn from Homer's Iliad, which Shakespeare likely knew through George Chapman's English translation. But the love story of Troilus and Cressida comes from somewhere else entirely. It does not appear in Greek mythology. It is a creation of the Middle Ages, first appearing in something like its familiar form between 1155 and 1160 in the Roman de Troie by the French poet Benoit de Sainte-Maure, written for the court of King Henry Plantagenet. Benoit built on late Roman texts by Dictys Cretensis and Dares Phrygius and added a romantic subplot of his own. From Benoit, the story passed to Boccaccio's Il Filostrato, and from there to Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, written around 1380. Shakespeare knew Chaucer well. He also drew on John Lydgate's Troy Book and Caxton's Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye. By Shakespeare's time, the character of Cressida had undergone a long transformation. Over the course of the sixteenth century, her image shifted so thoroughly toward infidelity and falseness that the name Pandarus had become a common synonym for a procurer, giving English the word "pander." Shakespeare inherited a story that his audience already understood as a story about betrayal, and he folded those expectations into the play's design.

• 4. The Problem of Genre

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  Frederick S. Boas, writing in the nineteenth century, argued that Troilus and Cressida belonged with Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well in a category all their own. He borrowed the term "problem play" from the socially conscious drama of Ibsen and Shaw, writers of his own era who staged political questions without easy resolutions. Some scholars have pushed back on the label. Jonathan Bate reads the play as a satire, deliberately puncturing the heroic world of Chapman's popular Homer translation. He points to Pandarus's cynical commentary on the lovers' night together, and to the weak, "feminine" language of supposedly valiant warriors. Bate also suggests the armored warrior who delivers the Prologue may have been a parody of Ben Jonson's Poetaster. Georg Brandes, the Danish Shakespeare scholar of the late nineteenth century, proposed a different explanation for the play's tonal chaos: that it was originally a more cheerful romantic comedy in the manner of As You Like It or Twelfth Night, then heavily revised, possibly by another hand, just before the 1609 printing. The revision, in this reading, injected the bitterness that makes the play resemble King Lear, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens, the dark works Shakespeare was producing in the 1605-1608 period. The literary scholar Joyce Carol Oates saw something else again. She called it "a new kind of contemporary tragedy," built on the impossibility of conventional tragedy, and described it as investigating "numerous infidelities, its criticism of tragic pretensions, above all, its implicit debate between what is essential in human life and what is only existential."

• 5. Wars and Relevance

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  For most of its history, Troilus and Cressida was rarely performed. John Dryden reworked it in 1679, re-ordered the scenes, and presented the result as The Truth Found Too Late at the Duke's Theatre in London. John Philip Kemble prepared an acting version in 1795 that sidelined Cressida in favor of the warriors, but abandoned the production before opening night. Henry Irving commissioned a new version in 1889 for the Lyceum Theatre and then did not stage it. The play's revival came in the twentieth century, and Peter Holland of Cambridge University traces that revival to a pattern: the work draws audiences when war feels imminent. William Poel's 1912 production played as the great powers of Europe were arming for conflict. Michael Macowan's modern-dress production of 1938 at the Westminster Theatre coincided with the Munich crisis. The Swan Theatre production in August 2012 cast Thersites as a wounded war veteran, and the killing of Hector by the Myrmidons resonated, as one account put it, with "the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan." John Barton, preparing the 1968 Royal Shakespeare Company production, drew explicit parallels between the stalemated siege of Troy and the prolonged war in Vietnam, describing the basic situation as "ludicrous, but also an insoluble impasse where both sides are inexorably committed." The BBC broadcast a modern-language version called The Face of Love in 1954, which was then staged by RADA at the Vanbrugh Theatre in 1956, providing Albert Finney with his first lead stage role.

• 6. Characters Beneath Their Legends

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  Shakespeare inherited figures whose reputations preceded them: Achilles, Ajax, Hector, Helen. He used those reputations against the audience. Almost every character in the play, the source notes, proves unworthy of their legendary status. Achilles sulks in his tent and has an unarmed Hector murdered by a group. Ajax is repeatedly described as valiant but stupid. Ulysses, the most intelligent Greek, engineers clever schemes but also leads the commanders in deliberately snubbing Achilles and coldly declares after meeting Cressida that she is a loose and unvirtuous woman. Thersites, a deformed and foul-mouthed figure of low class, functions as a kind of truth-teller, abusing everyone without restraint, and survives the battle through what the play calls brazen cowardice. Helen herself, the ostensible cause of the entire war, appears briefly and is described in cynical terms by Diomedes, who tells Paris that both he and Menelaus deserve her since both are fools willing to pay in blood for a whore. The 2012 Royal Shakespeare Company and Wooster Group collaboration dressed the Trojans as nineteenth-century Native Americans and the Greeks as contemporary soldiers, with Scott Shepherd as Troilus and Marin Ireland as Cressida on the Trojan side. The split staging gave physical form to what the play had always contained: two worlds at war, neither of them heroic.