“Wars and lechery: Nothing else holds fashion”: Troilus and Cressida
Explore Shakespeare’s epic tale of war, love, and loss — and the next virtual play reading in our Shakespeare NOW series
William Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida is the next reading in Lantern Theater Company’s Shakespeare NOW program. The reading is part of Lantern Anywhere, our new series of virtual artistic programming to enlighten and entertain you during this difficult time when we cannot come together in our theater.
Troilus and Cressida tells parallel stories. The first gives the play its name: the doomed love story between Troilus, a prince of Troy, and Cressida, a Trojan woman whose father has defected to the Greeks. Their romance is set against — and complicated by — the ongoing Trojan War. When the play begins, the Greeks have had Troy under siege for seven years, but the Greek army is in disarray and its most famous and feared fighter, Achilles, is sitting out of the conflict. As the love story unfolds and unravels, so too does the stalemate between the Greek and Trojan forces. By the end, hearts and shields are broken, and resolution seems out of reach.
Homer’s Iliad was Shakespeare’s primary source for the war thread of the story. In fact, Troilus and Cressida is one of the rare Shakespeare plays whose characters are perhaps more famous outside of Shakespeare’s work than within it: Ulysses, Achilles, Paris, Helen, Agamemnon, and other major figures of the Trojan War all play important roles in this rarely-performed epic play. The window it opens into the Trojan War may also be familiar to audiences, covering the brief period between Achilles refusing to fight and his return to battle — but stopping short of the war’s resolution.
However, the central love story is not present in The Iliad; though the Trojan prince Troilus is a figure in Greek literature, the story of his doomed romance with Cressida originated in a 12th-century French poem. The story was the basis for Chaucer’s poem Troilus and Criseyde, which served as Shakespeare’s primary source for the plot line. While Shakespeare took a decidedly more cynical approach, Chaucer’s version is the origin of a now-common phrase that both works live by: “All good things must come to an end.”
Shakespeare presents characters an audience is used to seeing as mythologically heroic — the warrior Achilles, the noble Hector, the brilliant Ulysses — and systematically turns each inside out so that the audience can see the emptiness or hypocrisy underneath. Even the central lovers are transformed: Chaucer’s Troilus and Cressida were essentially pure and ultimately victims of their circumstances. Shakespeare has a less charitable view of their love, and less sentiment for the choices they must make.
While the precise date of its composition cannot be known, Troilus and Cressida is usually placed between 1600 and 1603, probably shortly after Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. Like Measure for Measure, the play is often categorized as a “problem play” — one that does not fit neatly into either the tragedy or comedy genres, containing elements of both but the resolution of neither. Its tone ricochets from bawdy hilarity to despair, all bound up in the violence of a ceaseless war with no end in sight. But while there is death, there is no purely tragic ending, and while there is love, there is no marriage.
The difficulty in characterizing the play as a comedy or a tragedy has led to an unconventional production history. The first performance of the play is unknown — it is possible that it was performed once, around 1604. But a 1609 published edition claims it was never performed, indicating that either the earlier performance was scrapped, or — as some scholars believe — that it was heavily rewritten after its first performance to the point of becoming a different play. There are no recorded performances in Shakespeare’s lifetime or from 1734 to 1898.
But something changed in the 20th century. The play’s skeptical take on honor, pride, and loyalty have led many to consider it a modern play, one that raises existential questions about the nature of heroism that Shakespeare’s contemporary audience and those for centuries after were unwilling to ask.
Twentieth century audiences, though, were ready for these explorations, with two world wars upending and defining the first half of the century and nearly unrelenting conflict continuing through the rest of the century — and continuing today. A story that sharply undermines the view that war is essentially glorious, that warriors are innately heroic, and that love can conquer all found its audience in that conflict-weary century, 300 years after it was written.
With its surprisingly modern interrogation of leadership, civic responsibility, and political will, Troilus and Cressida is uniquely suited to our times. This Shakespeare NOW presentation offers today’s audiences a unique opportunity to experience a little-seen play asking questions that resonate more for a contemporary audience than they did for its original one.
Lantern Theater Company’s virtual reading of Troilus and Cressida is scheduled for Friday, June 5 at 7:30pm as part of our Shakespeare NOW program. Registration is FREE, but advance registration is required. Hurry, capacity is limited!
