Tag Archives: Troilus and Cressida

The Human Economy in War

In the false economy of war in the epic, human bodies are a commodity. Shakespeare, with Troilus and Cressida, reveals the grotesque and the mundane in the legend of the Trojan War. In the epic retellings of this ten year war, the world created is stagnant, without capitalism or production, without cultural exchange or growth. The Greeks remain camped outside the walls, and the Trojans within. Bodies become the only mediator of value, and are digested in various ways.

To digest: to divide and dispose; to disperse; to classify; to prepare food in the stomach; to suppurate. Many ways of seeing the word can be read into the human economy of Troilus and Cressida. Continue reading →

Introducing a Forgotten Play

Troilus and Cressida 1968 Royal Shakespeare Company- Some productions deliver the prologue with an imposing, anonymous warrior

Troilus and Cressida 1968
Royal Shakespeare Company- Some productions deliver the prologue with an imposing, anonymous warrior

The most noteworthy aspect of Troilus and Cressida’s early performance history is that it was barely performed, if at all. Even when introduced in the second edition of the first quarto, the preface vaunts the play as entertainment unsoiled by “the palms of the vulgar”, a production only existing as “a birth of your brain”. From its very inception, the play’s distinction seemed to be its resistance to staging, even its popular obscurity. As though to honor this prefatory omen, the play vanished from the stage afterwards for three hundred years. Between 1609 and 1907, no documented evidence of an English performance survives. So when the neo-Shakespeare upsurge of the 20th century plumbed the Shakespearean canon for material, Shakespeare’s untested Troilus and Cressida appeared, with plenty of directorial ruts and little precedent. The variety of approaches to the prologue alone attests to the uncertain challenge of stage performance without precedent– particularly this dodgy, gritty marvel of tale.

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A Poor What Now?

Capocchia

In a play about a war between Trojans and Greeks, a word in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida seems a bit out of place: the Italian word capocchia. The notes in the text of The Complete Pelican Shakespeare edition of the play merely translate it to mean “simpleton” (508). However, Gretchen Minton and Paul B. Harvey Jr. suggest that it may have a more raunchy meaning that better fits with the character of Pandarus (who utters the word) and the word play so beloved by Shakespeare. Continue reading →

The Elephant In The Room: Ajax

elephant, n.
1. b. fig. of a man of huge stature.
1609   Shakespeare Troilus and Cressida ii. iii. 2   Shall the Elephant Aiax carry it thus?

The elephant; noble, beautiful, and calm, gracefully shuffling forwards on four tree-stump legs that crush anything that may so unfortunately find itself beneath them—bugs, small mammals, human toes. It’s a fait that can’t be avoided because, as we know, elephants can’t bend their knees.  Continue reading →

Cressida as a Commodity in Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida”

Man’s desire for Helen has fueled a 7-year battle between Sparta and Troy in Shakespeare’s play Troilus and Cressida, but it is the objectification of Cressida and the roles men have in her life that Shakespeare uses to comment on the patriarchal values of society. The act of marriage and the exchange of women maintained the patriarchal structures of both the play’s setting in Ancient Greece and Jacobean England in which Shakespeare was writing. Continue reading →