Troilus and Cressida

The RSC Shakespeare
Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen
Chief Associate Editors: Héloïse Sénéchal and Jan Sewell
Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro, Dee Anna Phares

Troilus and Cressida
Textual editing: Eric Rasmussen
Introduction and Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater: Jonathan Bate
Commentary: Christopher Campbell and Héloïse Sénéchal
Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Esme Miskimmin
In Performance: Jan Sewell (RSC stagings) and Peter Kirwan (overview)
The Director’s Cut (interviews by Jonathan Bate and Kevin Wright):
Michael Boyd and Trevor Nunn

Editorial Advisory Board
Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Director, Royal Shakespeare Company
Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK
Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia
Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature, Université de Genève, Switzerland
Jacqui O’Hanlon, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company
Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, Japan
Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA
James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, USA
Tiffany Stern, Professor and Tutor of English, University of Oxford, UK

2010 Modern Library Paperback Edition

Copyright © 2007, 2010 by The Royal Shakespeare Company

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

“Royal Shakespeare Company,” “RSC,” and the RSC logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of The Royal Shakespeare Company.

The version of Troilus and Cressida and the corresponding footnotes that appear in this volume were originally published in William Shakespeare: Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, published in 2007 by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-1-58836-878-2

www.BookishMall.com

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CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Tragical-Comical-Historical?

“What’s Aught but as ’Tis Valued?”

The Critics Debate

About the Text

Key Facts

Troilus and Cressida

List of Parts

Textual Notes

Quarto Passages That Do Not Appear in the Folio

Scene-by-Scene Analysis

Troilus and Cressida in Performance: The RSC and Beyond

Four Centuries of Troilus and Cressida: An Overview

At the RSC

The Director’s Cut: Interviews with Michael Boyd and Trevor Nunn

Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater

Beginnings

Playhouses

The Ensemble at Work

The King’s Man

Shakespeare’s Works: A Chronology

The History Behind the Tragedies: A Chronology

Further Reading and Viewing

References

Acknowledgments and Picture Credits

The Modern Library

INTRODUCTION

TRAGICAL-COMICAL-HISTORICAL?

Troilus and Cressida perhaps reveals more of Shakespeare’s mature mind at work than any of the other plays. It is highly intelligent, rich in rhetorical complexity and linguistic invention, mentally rigorous, morally skeptical, sexually charged, full of dangerous intellectual and political energy, markedly unpleasant. Most characteristically of all, it is impossible to characterize generically, being at once comedy, tragedy, history, and satire.

It was written toward the end of Shakespeare’s great run of comedies. In the First Folio of his collected plays, for reasons of licensing and as a result of printing problems, Troilus and Cressida was a last-minute addition. It arrived so belatedly that it is absent from the contents list, and indeed some early copies were published without it. The editors managed to squeeze it in between the histories and the tragedies, which is a fitting place: it is a tragedy in that the Trojan War, the subject of Homer’s Iliad, was Western tragedy’s foundational theme, but it had been published independently in Quarto format in 1609 as The Famous History of Troilus and Cresseid, a title emphasizing a medieval romance accretion to the classical epic tale. A prefatory epistle in some copies of the Quarto performs a delicate balancing act, acknowledging that the play is “passing full of the palm comical,” but emphasizing its serious literary content and praising Shakespeare’s works for being “so framed to the life that they serve for the most common commentaries of all the actions of our lives.”

The critical reception of the play has long been bedeviled by the difficulty of establishing its genre. The early nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine remarked that it was neither comedy nor tragedy in the usual sense and that it accordingly could not be judged by received standards of criticism. At the end of the nineteenth century, a new designation provided a way out of the generic impasse: “problem play.” The term arose in response to the innovative drama that emerged at that time as part of a wider movement toward realism in the arts. It was first used with respect to plays by dramatists such as Henrik Ibsen that approached contentious social issues via debates between the characters on stage, each of whom stood for a particular point of view. Whether the subject was the confinement of women in marriage (A Doll’s House, 1879), the visitation of the sexual sins of the father upon the son (Ghosts, 1882), or the strong idealist pitched against petit bourgeois self-interest (An Enemy of the People, 1882), Ibsen was master of the drama of social problems. In the British theater, George Bernard Shaw followed in his wake. So it was that in Shakespeare and His Predecessors (1896), the critic F. S. Boas suggested that a group of Shakespeare’s middle-period works had characteristics similar to those of the Ibsenesque problem play. His prime examples were Troilus and Cressida together with the contemporaneously written bitter comedies (later sometimes called “dark” comedies), All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure: “All these dramas introduce us into highly artificial societies, whose civilization is ripe unto rottenness … throughout these plays we move along dim untrodden paths, and at the close our feeling is neither of simple joy nor pain; we are excited, fascinated, perplexed, for the issues raised preclude a completely satisfactory outcome.”

“In such unpopular plays as All’s Well, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida, we find [Shakespeare] ready and willing to start at the twentieth century if only the seventeenth century would let him”: this is Shaw in the “Preface, Mainly about Myself” in his Plays Unpleasant, a collection of three of his dramas about social hypocrisy and the corrupting effect of money, first published in 1898. The best of those plays is about prostitution (Mrs Warren’s Profession), while the “problem” at the center of All’s Well and Measure for Measure turns on a “bed trick” in which a man thinks he is sleeping with one woman when it is really another. In short, then, to say that Troilus and Cressida was a “problem” play was to say—as one couldn’t spell out specifically in the late Victorian era—that it was a play about sex.

Critics in the first half of the twentieth century remained somewhat coy about admitting this. There was much talk of how the play was filled with cynicism and loathing. Thus Mark van Doren, an urbane American critic, writing in 1939:

The style of Troilus and Cressida is loud, brassy, and abandoned. The world which Chaucer has left so tenderly intact explodes as if a mine had been touched off beneath it, while a host of characters, conceived partly in doubt and partly in disgust, rave at the tops of their never modulated voices. All of them are angry, all of them are distrustful and mendacious; and the tone of each is hardened to rasping by some unmotivated irritation.1

All true, but is the “irritation” really unmotivated? After all, the Trojan War itself was motivated by the abduction (seduction? rape?) of Helen by Paris. Helen is the traditional embodiment of sex on legs. She provokes desire, pride, possessiveness, jealousy, disgust, bitterness, the sense of affronted honor: exactly the complex of emotions that runs through the play. In Romeo and Juliet the romantic lovers are pitted against the world around them. The love of Troilus and Cressida, by contrast, may have its romantic moments, but the play is utterly realistic about how their relationship does not escape the cruelty, irrationality, sordidness, selfishness, and pain that is everywhere else on the battlefield of Troy.

Some scholars have wrongly inferred from certain phrases in the Quarto preface (which is reproduced at the beginning of our textual notes) that the play was written solely for private performance, perhaps for a sophisticated audience of student lawyers at the Inns of Court, who would have appreciated its vein of formal debate and rhetorical elaboration. But the language of Pandarus, with its direct addresses to “tongue-tied maidens,” “sisters of the door-hold trade,” and “Winchester geese” (meaning Southwark prostitutes), implies the social and sexual mix of the Globe audience, not the male exclusivity of the Inns of Court. There is no reason to doubt that the play was, in the words of the title page of other copies of the Quarto, “acted by the King’s Majesties Servants at the Globe.” The suggestion that Troilus is somehow too intellectual for the public playhouse, that it was written for elite “private” taste, is mere condescension. Plenty of other Globe plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries stretch the intellectual sinews while simultaneously appealing to the humor of the privy and the bedroom. At the same time, there is no doubt that the sensibility expressed in the play bears a resemblance to that of such lawyer-dramatists as John Marston, who were educated in the Inns of Court and came to prominence in the theater world in the first years of the seventeenth century:

A pattern of misrule prevails—political as well as personal, parodies of authority in mock-courts and governments … Linguistic misrule, including double entendres, scatology, and scurrility, also recurs, along with paradox and mock-encomia … Mock-rhetoric … is heard … As rhetorical order seems inverted, forms of reason are stood on their head … Mock-chivalry occurs … Social manners are reflected parodically … Academic emphases recur … Law references, as well as mock-legalisms, recur.2

Despairing of whether to call it history, comedy, or tragedy, many twentieth-century critics, with some justification, regarded Troilus and Cressida as a satire, very much in the mode of writers such as Marston.