Troilus and Cressida

I am hardly a Shakespeare expert, but a great admirer. I attend plays when I can in Ashland, Oregon, Carmel Pacific Rep, Shakespeare Santa Cruz. I've nearly finished all of Shakespeare's plays and would like to reread the entirety. Please correct me in my comments as I am happy to learn.

Troilus and Cressida is a most interesting play in its sheer, overt cynicism about love and war. The polar opposite to "As You Like It" of young love, triumphant. It was written after Hamlet. In "As You Like It" its as if the bard wrote the play "in love" and T&C through the eyes of an old man who has seen much of the world, the betrayals of love, the hubris of war.

I've progressed to Act 3 at this point.

that's an interesting idea, belleyang! (about writing it when he's older and more cynical about love)
t & c is certainly an interesting play, especially when i read it with my background in ancient literature. these heroic figures are fascinatingly characterized by shakespeare!

i'm curious to hear other people's opinions on this play, too!

Harold Bloom in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human says there is something of Hamlet lingering in T&C.

Whether you agree with Bloom or not, he is good company when reading the plays.

Troilus and Cressida is one I haven't read, so I'm dong that now. I did pull Bloom's book to see what he had to say. I do sometimes agree with what he says, but even when I don't, it's always interesting.

Ah, yes ... such a nasty little play, huh? I loved it!

I sort of agree with your point about contrasting it with Romeo & Juliet (oops! I have to edit this here, because I see that you didn't contrast it with R&J ... sorry! Still, I'll let my comments stand as they are), in that his age might have affected his reverse take on Love, but, for me, I've always thought that Romeo etc. was the height of idealism (this is how Love should be), while Troilus etc. was the height of reality (This is how Love really is in most cases).

The survival rate of most marriages these days backs this idea up, doncha think? You go into it feeling like R&J and go out of it feeling like T&C.

Douglas

"In the end, only kindness matters."

>5 doogiewray: lol, doogiewray. You put it so well. Care to comment on Thersites in the "Fools" thread? The meanest, most rabid fool of all. Least charming, but the most truthful. Yes, and I, too, am becoming inordinately fond of this "nasty little play."

Check out Cressida's statement at the very end of Act 1 Scene 2. and contrast it to any one of Juliet's soliloquies.

>2 haftime: Haftime--I'm looking forward to your comments when you read T&C. It's almost as long as the longest play, Hamlet and it's not easy reading, but very rewarding. With your strong background in the classics, I'm curious to know your response to Shakespeare's version of the story.

Also, what was Thersites's character like in the Iliad? What was his role? Thersites is rabid and I disliked him initially; as I encountered him more, I recognized how truthful and funny he really is. He knows himself to bes a scoundrel and a coward and admits as much. I quite like him now, but he is not someone I would have coffee with.

The play has abundant references to diseases, not only the venereal, but deformities (Thersites is deformed) and almost every afflictions of the body one can name

I'm reading Act V now and once I finish, I may decide to read Chaucer's Troilus and Cressyde.

Any chance theCardiffGiant, (I assume Haftime's family) a Classicist, will read T&C and make his comments?

Finished T&C at 1:30 AM last night. I agree with Harold Bloom in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, this is a more intelligent play than Hamlet! The personalities of heros are etched with an acid pen.

I was surprised to find myself deeply saddened by the sudden death of Hector, felled by Achilles and his wolf pack of Myrmidons. But we see the cause of Hector's fall is his greed for an anonymous Greek's beautiful armor. He kills the Greek, strips the man of his armor then himself disarms. At this point Achille and his rabble fall upon him.

5.2.141 is spot on!

Have you ever experienced betrayal, be it by a lover, friend or an ideal? The stunned disbelief that ensues whereupon you try to reconcile the widely disparate images of the formerly perceived perfection and the raw ugliness at hand.

Troilus attempts to attune his cherished ideal of Cressida with her betrayl. (Hiding in the shadows, he has seen her giving away his love-token, a sleeve, to Diomedes.)

This she? No, this is Diomed's Cressida.
If beauty have a soul, this is not she;
If souls guide vows, if vows be sanctimonies,
If sanctimony be the gods'delight,
If there be rule in unity itself,
This is not she. Oh, madness of discourse,
That cause sets up with and against itself...
Within my soul there doth conduce a fight
Of this strange nature, that a thing inseparate
Divides more wider than the sky and earth.

I don't think I would have appreciated T&C in my twenties or even my thirties. It's definitely an older person's dish.

It was not known to have been staged in Shakespeare's time, I believe. Some people say perhaps privately for lawyers. There's not a lot of physical action, but it has a HUGE internal margin. I read somewhere that Shakespeare wrote it in the 17th Century waiting for a 20th Century audience.

I must admit I've been interested in Shakespeare for a long time, but I've doggedly stuck with him because of other people's enthusiasm, all the brouhaha of a big industry engendered from his works, be it festivals or books of criticisms. I had one of those ah-ha! moments reading T&C and now I am a certified Shakespeare-fiend.

If you are considering reading this play, you should approach it slowly. I initially tried to rush it and missed far too much. I made a conscious decision read a scene or two at a time.

It's unfortunate that that the term "problem play" is used because an initiate to Shakespeare would thing that problem equates with bad.

It is a "problem play" partly because it's is not strictly comedy, tragey, farce or history.

From Shakespeare A to Z:

"The problem plays--all written around 1602-04--are concerned with basic elements of life, sex and death,and the psychological and social complications they give rise to. These issues are problematic, and the plays further stress this by pointedly offering no clear-cut resolutions, leaving audiences witha painful awareness of life's difficulties.

The other two "problem plays" are "Measure for Meaure" and "Alls's Well that Ends Well."

>9 belleyang: Correction: It was George Bernard Shaw who said in these "problem plays," Shakespeare was 'ready and willing to start in the twentieth century if the seventeenth would only let him.'

Interesting that Richard Lattimore, the tranlslator of "The Iliad of Homer," points out that Thersites the only person who receives “full physical characterization, and it is the grotesque Thersites (2. 216-219) who receives it precisely because he varies from the august standard of the characteristic hero. Elsewhere, single adjectives as ‘huge,’ ‘fair-haired,’ ‘glancing eyed’..."

Troilus and Cressida

This is one of the Willie's I have not read. It goes on the "list" yet to be read for 2021.