The Trojans remain firm in their mutual support. Their cause is worthy, if only because they believe in it. They speak glittering words of honour, generosity, bravery, love. Here is a strange and happy contrast with the shadowed world of the Greek camp, where all seems stagnant, decadent, paralysed. Troy is a world breathing the air of medieval, storied romance; the Greek camp exists on that of Renaissance satire and disillusion.13

Jan Kott in the 1960s retains the neat opposition, but suggests that the idealizing, “medieval” values of the Trojans are regarded as outdated:

The Greeks are down-to-earth, heavy and brutal. They know that the war is being fought over a cuckold and a hussy, and they do not have to make themselves believe that they die for the sake of loyalty and honour. They are part of another, new world … The Trojans insist on their ridiculous absolutes and a medieval code of combat. They are anachronistic.14

By the 1990s, the sharp distinction has collapsed altogether. Indeed, Greek language is seen to be Trojan and Trojan to be Greek:

The Greek camp, taking its identity from Homer, is an all-male world dominated by an ethic of honor and combat; the Trojan camp, inspired by Chaucer and other romance writers, is a courtly world devoted to an ethic of chivalric love. This geographical division, which almost suggests a gender distinction between the male/Greek and female/Trojan, effects a curious dislocation of rhetoric: imagery of battle shapes the experience of love in the Trojan camp; imagery of love and courtship colors the depiction of combat and male rivalry in the Greek camp.15

The play works out in the Trojan scenes the arbitrariness and hollowness of the two most valued aristocratic codes of the Elizabethan court, romance and chivalry. Even Hector, who is the least satirized, most heroic character in the play, succumbs to the corrosive dynamics of the drama when, quite against his careful Aristotelian ethical argument, he advocates keeping Helen and continuing the war. The elaborate chivalry of the Trojan interactions with the Greeks seems simply ridiculous in the face of the war’s material death and destruction.16

Wherever there is war and debate about the rights and wrongs of going to war, Troilus and Cressida will be a living play. Sadly, that means it will go on living as long as human society.

ABOUT THE TEXT

Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can’t).

Because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, editors also have to make decisions about the relative authority of the early printed editions. Half of the sum of his plays only appeared posthumously, in the elaborately produced First Folio text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press by Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. The other half had appeared in print in his lifetime, in the more compact and cheaper form of “Quarto” editions, some of which reproduced good quality texts, others of which were to a greater or lesser degree garbled and error-strewn. In the case of a few plays there are hundreds of differences between the Quarto and Folio editions, some of them far from trivial. Troilus and Cressida comes into the latter category. Editors accordingly have to decide whether to base their text on the Quarto, the Folio, or some combination of the two.

If you look at printers’ handbooks from the age of Shakespeare, you quickly discover that one of the first rules was that, whenever possible, compositors were recommended to set their type from existing printed books rather than manuscripts. This was the age before mechanical typesetting, where each individual letter had to be picked out by hand from the compositor’s case and placed on a stick (upside down and back to front) before being laid on the press. It was an age of murky rushlight and of manuscripts written in a secretary hand that had dozens of different, hard-to-decipher forms. Printers’ lives were a lot easier when they were reprinting existing books rather than struggling with handwritten copy. Easily the quickest way to have created the First Folio would have been simply to reprint those eighteen plays that had already appeared in Quarto and only work from manuscript on the other eighteen.

But that is not what happened. Whenever Quartos were used, playhouse “promptbooks” were also consulted and stage directions copied in from them. And in the case of several major plays where a reasonably well-printed Quarto was available, Troilus notable among them, the Folio printers were instructed to work from an alternative, playhouse-derived manuscript.