Troilus and Cressida: A Critical Reader

Efterpi Mitsi, Andrew Hiscock, Lisa Hopkins

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781350178700
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350014183
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

Troilus and Cressida: A Critical Reader offers an accessible and thought-provoking guide to this complex problem play, surveying its key themes and evolving critical preoccupations. Considering its generic ambiguity and experimentalism, it also provides a uniquely detailed and up-to-date history of the play's stage performance from Dryden's rewriting up to Mark Ravenhill and Elizabeth LeCompte's controversial 2012 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Wooster Group.


Moving through to four new critical essays, the guide opens up fresh perspectives on the play's iconoclastic nature and its key themes, ranging from issues of gender and sexuality to Elizabethan politics, from the uses of antiquity to questions of cultural translation, with particular attention paid on Troilus' "Greekness".

The volume finishes with a helpful guide to critical and web-based resources. Discussing the ways in which this challenging and acerbic play can be brought to life in the classroom, it suggests performance-based strategies, designed to engage with the dramaturgical and theatrical dimensions of the text; close-reading exercises with an emphasis on rhetoric, metaphor and the practice of "troping"; and a series of tools designed to situate the play in a range of contexts, including its classical and critical frameworks.

1

The Critical Backstory

The Reception of Troilus and Cressida through the Ages

Kinga Földváry

It would be an understatement to claim that Troilus and Cressida is a controversial play. It is not only controversial in its theme and moral message, or its effect on audiences, but even in its dramatic structure and textual history, therefore it should come as little surprise that the play has troubled readers and viewers, critics and scholars, performers and academics alike throughout its history of more than 400 years. Coleridge struggled with its description, ‘scarcely knowing what to say of it’,¹ Hazlitt declared it ‘loose and desultory’,² Swinburne found in the play proof that ‘some cynic had lately bitten [Shakespeare] by the brain’,³ and Mark van Doren went as far as considering it ‘Shakespeare’s revenge upon mankind’.⁴ It is equally true, of course, that Troilus and Cressida has never been and is not now without its own ardent fans: David Bevington confesses in his introduction to the new Arden Shakespeare edition of the drama that for him, ‘the play is remarkably tender, sad and personal, in the midst of its unsparing depiction of brutality’.⁵ Such a statement may sound surprising as hardly any critical voices have been raised in appreciation of the play’s tenderness, although many were eager to remark on its brutality. And yet, it is not too hard to convince ourselves why it is indeed a heart-breaking play, a drama of young love gone all too wrong, a catastrophe of thwarted hopes and ambitions – not to mention the whole universal tragedy of the Trojan war in the background, which only adds to our presentiments of impending doom and disaster that threatens to bring down all of civilization as we know it.

The truth is, Troilus and Cressida continues to fascinate us, for all its obvious and undeniable inconsistencies. It displays not only the usual Shakespearean queries of when it was written, where and how it was first performed, and which of the Quarto texts is more authoritative – after all, we are acquainted with such problems from our dealings with practically every single play in the canon. Nor is Troilus and Cressida the only drama whose classification makes it problematic; for more than a century now, it has had a comfortable position among a whole group of similarly troublesome plays whose (retrospectively applied) generic label, the ‘problem play’, reflects on the difficulty of their categorization, as they ‘do not fit snugly into any of the major classifications’.⁶ In fact, all of these issues would simply offer challenges that Shakespeare scholars are more or less familiar with, but what opens onto a particularly dangerous minefield is the diversity of critical opinion that the play has attracted over the past 400 years. Is it a bad play, even one of the worst, or does it display the most tangible proof of Shakespeare’s genius? Should any part of the narrative be taken at face value, or is irony its governing device? Did Shakespeare fail to do his homework in the classics, or did he consciously alter what he found in his sources, to highlight new aspects of the same old story? Do the inconsistencies point to a different author’s hand, or are these interpretative cruxes similar to those we can find in the rest of the canon? Questions like these feature in nearly all accounts, and as the following summary of the play’s critical history intends to show, it was not until the mid-twentieth century that general critical opinion has settled into acknowledging the play’s remarkable qualities and appreciating them over its weaknesses.

Creation and first texts

There are a number of reasons why Troilus and Cressida has the dubious honour of being ‘ranked among the most controversial of Shakespeare’s plays’,⁷ one of these reasons being the drama’s somewhat puzzling early publication history. The general consensus concerning the play’s creation usually points towards the very beginning of the seventeenth century, around the years 1602 or 1603, right after Hamlet, and before, or at least close to, the two other plays also labelled as ‘problem plays’: All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure.⁸ Internal evidence, thematic concerns, a remarkable similarity between Hamlet and Troilus, together with the equally noticeable difficulties of categorization with the other two make the dating more or less likely and as convincing as it is possible. The play was entered into the Stationers’ Register twice, first conditionally in 1603 by James Roberts, ‘to print when he hath gotten sufficient aucthority for yt’, and then again in 1609 by Richard Bonian and Henry Walley.⁹ The 1603 entry implies that the play was performed (‘as yt is acted by my lo: Chamberlens Men’),¹⁰ yet what seems certain is that James Roberts did not print Troilus and Cressida in 1603.

The next entry in 1609, however, was followed by the publication of a Quarto edition – or, more precisely, two versions of the same, with the only significant difference in the title page (‘one issue with two states of issue’¹¹). While both title pages refer to the text as a history (the second one as ‘The Famous Historie of Troylus and Cresseid’¹²), the printer’s/publisher’s preface (that David Bevington calls ‘an enigmatic publicity blurb’¹³) attached to the revised version consistently refers to the play as a comedy. The two titles are also at odds as regards the past accessibility of the play: one making the typical claim to a previous performance: ‘as it was acted by the Kings Maiesties seruants at the Globe’;¹⁴ while the publisher’s preface in the later version states that the play has never before been acted on the public stage, or more precisely, that it had never been ‘clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar’ (‘A Never Writer’, lines 2–3).¹⁵ The exact meaning of the words has often been disputed, whether it actually means no previous performance, or simply no performance on a public stage, but rather in one of the Inns of Court (a theory proposed by Peter Alexander in 1928¹⁶), or even at one of the universities.¹⁷

The First Folio of 1623 does not do much to dispel the above listed textual uncertainties; indeed, it adds to them by giving the title as ‘The Tragedie of Troylus and Cressida’, but placing the play in an odd position within the volume: between the histories (after Henry VIII) and tragedies (before Coriolanus). At the same time, the play is missing from the Catalogue (i.e. the table of contents), suggesting a later insertion into the volume, most probably as a result of the printer Jaggard’s late acquisition of the rights for publication from the copyright holders (although some scholars dispute the authority of this hypothesis¹⁸). There is also evidence to suggest that had it not been for this last-minute arrangement, which resulted in Jaggard’s printing the play on a separate quire of paper, it would have been placed after Romeo and Juliet, among the tragedies,¹⁹ and in a much less ambiguous position genre-wise. There are a few surviving copies of F1 which do not include the play at all, and a few others, among them one in the Folger Library, have the leaf with the last page of Romeo and Juliet on one side, and the first page of Troilus on the other.²⁰ As it is, however, the practically liminal placement proved to be prophetic – no single genre category seems able to lay absolute claim to this play, and it was only the late nineteenth-century critics who came up with the most satisfactory terms we have used ever since to describe the problematic nature of the small group of dark tragicomedies where Troilus and Cressida seems to find its best place.

The differences between the Quarto and Folio texts are numerous, and not all can be explained as simple editorial emendations; indeed, the relationship between the two versions – which one should be seen as a revision of the other? – is still often debated. David Bevington in his ‘Preface’ even recommends publishing the two versions separately,²¹ in order to highlight the thousands of differences between them, yet he also remarks that these ‘come down for the most part to individual word choice’,²² rather than missing or reassigned speeches or even whole scenes, as is the case with Hamlet or King Lear. Even so, there are several major differences; apart from the above-mentioned printer’s epistle found only in the revised Quarto, the Folio includes a Prologue to the play, although this can be seen as an example of ‘padding’, inserted by the editors ‘to fill up the extra white space’.²³ ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Series Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Timeline
• Introduction
• 1 The Critical Backstory: The Reception of Troilus and Cressida through the Ages
• 2 The Performance History
• 3 The State of the Art
• 4 New Directions: The Decay of Exemplarity in Troilus and Cressida
• 5 New Directions: ‘What Art Thou, Greek?’: Greeks and Greece in Troilus and Cressida
• 6 New Directions: ‘[B]its and Greasy Relics’: The Politics of Relics in Troilus and Cressida
• 7 New Directions: Scenes of Repossession: Greek Translations and Performances of Troilus and Cressida
• 8 ‘Degrees in Schools’: Learning and Teaching Strategies
• Appendix: Theatre Resources
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright