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25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The most unsung, but perhaps the most modern, of Shakespeare, March 11, 2002
One of his lesser known works, Shakespeare's Trojan play is also one of his most intriguing. Not quite a burlesque, 'Troilus and Cressida''s lurches in tone, from farce to historical drama to romance to tragedy, and its blurring of these modes, explains why generations of critics and audiences have found it so unsatisfying, and why today it can seem so modern. Its disenchanted tone, its interest in the baser human instincts underlying (classical) heroism look forward to such 20th century works as Giraudoux's 'The Trojan War Will Not Take Place' or Terry Jones' 'Chaucer's Knight'; the aristocratic ideals of Love and War, inextricably linked in this play, are debased by the merchant-class language of exchange, trade, food, possesion - the passionate affair at its centre is organised by the man who gave his name to pimps, Pandarus, and is more concerned with immediate sexual gratification than anything transcendental. The Siege of Troy sequences are full of the elaborately formal rhetoric we expect from Shakespeare's history plays, but well-wrought diplomacy masks ignoble trickery; the great heroes Ajax and Achilles are petulant egotists, the latter preferring the company of his catamite to combat; the actual war sequences, when they finally come, are a breathless farce of exits and entrances. There are a lot of words in this play, but very few deeds. Paris, Prince of Troy, has abducted Helen, wife of Menelaus, King of Sparta. Led by the latter's brother Agamemnon, and his Machiavellian advisors Ulysses and Nestor, the Greeks besiege Troy, demanding the return of Helen. However, Achilles' dissatisfaction at the generals' endless politicking has spread discontent in the ranks. Within Troy, war takes a distinct second place to matters of the heart. While Paris wallows in luxury with his prize, his youngest brother Troilus uses Pandarus as a go-between to arrange a night of love with his niece, Cressida. When one of the Trojan leaders is taken prisoner by the Greeks, the ransom price is Cressida. There is only one character in 'Troilus' who can be said to be at all noble and not self-interested, the eldest Trojan prince Hector, who, despite his odd interpreation of the quality 'honour', detests a meaningless war, and tries to spare as many of his enemies' lives as he can. He is clearly an anachronism, however, and his ignoble slaughter at the hands of a brutal gang suggests what price chivalry. Perhaps the most recognisable character is Thirsitis, the most savagely cynical of his great Fools. Imagine Falstaff without the redeeming lovability - he divests heroes and events of their false values, satirises motivations, abuses his dim-witted 'betters' and tries to preserve his life at any cost. Written in between 'Hamlet' and 'All's Well That Ends Well', 'Troilus' bears all the marks of Shakespeare's mid-period: the contrapuntal structure, the dense figures, the audacious neologisms, and the intitially deferred, accelerated action. If some of the diplomacy scenes are too efective in their parodic pastiche of classical rhetoric, and slow things down, Act 5 is an amazing dramatic rush, crowning the play's disenchantment with love (with an extraordinarily creepy three-way spaying of an infidelity) and war. The New Penguin Shakespeare is the most accessible and user-friendly edition for students and the general reader (although it does need updating). Unlike the Oxford or Arden series, which offer unwieldy introductions (yawning with irrelevant conjecture about dates and sources) and unusable notes (clotted with tedious pedantry more concerned with fighting previous commentators than elucidating Shakespeare), the Penguin's format offers a clear Introduction dealing with the play and its contexts, an appendix 'An Account of the Text', and functional endnotes that gloss unfamiliar words and difficult passages. The Introduction is untainted by fashions in Critical Theory, but is particularly good at explaining the role of Time ('When time is old and hath forgot itself...And blind oblivion swallowed cities up'), the shifting structure, the multiple viewpoints in presenting characters, and Shakespeare's use of different literary and linguistic registers.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
tastes great, if you have the stomach, November 28, 2001
I think this is one os Shakespeare's most underrated plays, probably because of all the uncouth characters. Based on Chaucer's rendition of the story, T and C are Trojan lovers, and she is then traded to the Greeks in exchange for captive soldiers. Aside from this, the women of Troy are wanton and lustful, and the men are prowess driven. If you can deal with this, you will really enjoy Shakespeare's ability to wrap this into all kinds of twists and turns. It delivers a mixture of satire, comedy, romance, tragedy, and a semi-historical (in that people at the time probably believed the Trojan War really happened). Interestingly, this mixture of laughs and tragedy is reminiscent of war novels I have read about Vietnam. The romantic dimensions give this play its edge, and somehow WS manages to make it plausible in spite of all the killing and deceit going on at the same time.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Bard's Blackest Comedy: X-Rated, Post-Nietzschean Shakespeare, August 1, 2007
I know readers who claim to prefer this play to Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde"--which tells you something either about their inability to read Chaucer or their jaded sense of humor. Shakespeare's version of the story is every bit as dark and sardonic as Chaucer's is light and satiric. In fact, this must be the Bard's blackest comedy, too strained, disconnected, and unfocused to pass muster as "tragedy." In fact, if we take seriously Ulysses' oft-quoted speech on "degree" (accepting one's limits as a requirement for cosmic order) and Troilus' confirmation of an up-ended moral universe ("the bonds of heaven have slipped!"), there's no longer room for the heroic or tragic in the modern world Shakespeare has created in this play.
Despite containing some of the playwright's most memorable and eloquent speeches, it's the cynical tone and absurdist context, not story or character, that we remember from the play. Somewhat like Hitchcock in "Rear Window," Shakespeare places the reader in the position of deviant-voyeur, subjecting him to both the testimony and proof of Thersites' recurring reminder that, where heroism and love are concerned, all is "war and lechery." If we decide to stay the course, we're rewarded at play's end with Pandarus's speech to the audience, promising to bequeath us with "his diseases." It's shocking that Shakespeare got away with such material in a pre-penicillin era, but no less noteworthy is the audience's masochistic compliance (in itself, a potential commentary on the degradation that Shakespeare forcefully exposes and criticizes in this play).
The play often scores with modern audiences because productions opportunistically go "over the top" with exaggerated visual and verbal bawdry. The textual version is necessarily five stars because nothing can touch Shakespeare (except perhaps in this case Chaucer). Still it's a good thing that the guardians of public morality aren't better readers or this one might not make the cut in some venues where Shakespeare is performed. In fact, that situation could soon change if acting companies continue to substitute for Shakespeare's language gross and attention-getting stage antics, using the master wordsmith as a license for selling sensation.
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