Amazon.com: Troilus and Cressida (9781420932201): William Shakespeare: Books Troilus and Cressida Why is ISBN important? ISBN This bar-code number lets you verify that you're getting exactly the right version or edition of a book. The 13-digit and 10-digit formats both work. Scan an ISBN with your phone Use the Amazon App to scan ISBNs and compare prices. Have one to sell? Sell on Amazon Add to List Sorry, there was a problem. There was an error retrieving your Wish Lists. Please try again. Sorry, there was a problem. List unavailable. Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1 This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading. Editorial Reviews Review "I cannot recommend too highly the whole series to all theatre lovers, theatregoers, theatre practicioners, and anybody who enjoys Shakespeare." Robert Tanitch, What's On in London "This edition is one to which I will turn to again and again.

It should appeal to anyone who believes that production history offers an especially vibrant kind of interpretation. Its composite portrait of Troilus and Cressida is of a play that has indeed come into its own in the modern world." - David Bevington, University of Chicago --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition. Read more Review 'A triumphant addition to our times.' - Fiona Shaw, The Times --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition. Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here , or download a FREE Kindle Reading App . New York Times best sellers Browse the New York Times best sellers in popular categories like Fiction, Nonfiction, Picture Books and more. See more Product Details Publisher: Digireads.com (January 1, 2009) Language: English Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.3 x 9 inches Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces VINE VOICE on June 13, 2008 Format: Paperback Verified Purchase Amazon seems to be including all the reviews of different editions and translations of Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde" on the same page. If you read the reviews here you will be very confused.

Some refer to an original language edition (either the one made by R. A. Shoaf or Stephen Barney's Norton Critical edition), and some refer to a translation, at least one to the translation done by Nevill Coghill. The reader needs to pay careful attention to what edition is actually on the screen when making a selection. If you want to read the original text, I would recommend Stephen Barney's edition. Barney is the editor who made the critical edition for the Riverside Chaucer, and his Norton Critical edition includes ten excellent critical essays in addition to Chaucer's poem, Giovanni Boccaccio's "Il Filostrato" (Chaucer's source), and Robert Henryson's "Testament of Crisseid." Shoaf's edition is also good, but twice as expensive, and it does not have as much contextual material. Coghill is a fine translator of Chaucer, and for the reader who does not want to tackle the Middle English he will provide an adequate experience. But beware: His smooth couplets sound more like Alexander Pope than the vigorous medieval writer he is translating.

9780141396415: Troilus and Cressida - AbeBooks - Shakespeare, William: 0141396415 Troilus and Cressida ISBN 10: 0141396415 ISBN 13: 9780141396415 Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2015 About this title This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself.

Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. Product Description: Webster's paperbacks take advantage of the fact that classics are frequently assigned readings in English courses. By using a running English-to-Hindi thesaurus at the bottom of each page, this edition of Troilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare was edited for three audiences. The first includes Hindi-speaking students enrolled in an English Language Program (ELP), an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) program, an English as a Second Language Program (ESL), or in a TOEFL? or TOEIC? preparation program. The second audience includes English-speaking students enrolled in bilingual education programs or Hindi speakers enrolled in English-speaking schools. The third audience consists of students who are actively building their vocabularies in Hindi in order to take foreign service, translation certification, Advanced Placement? (AP?) or similar examinations.

By using the Webster's Hindi Thesaurus Edition when assigned for an English course, the reader can enrich their vocabulary in anticipation of an examination in Hindi or English. TOEFL?, TOEIC?, AP? and Advanced Placement? are trademarks of the Educational Testing Service which has neither reviewed nor endorsed this book. All rights reserved. From the Publisher: Designed for school districts, educators, and students seeking to maximize performance on standardized tests, Websterï¿½s paperbacks take advantage of the fact that classics are frequently assigned readings in English courses. By using a running thesaurus at the bottom of each page, this edition of Troilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare was edited for students who are actively building their vocabularies in anticipation of taking PSAT®, SAT®, AP® (Advanced Placement®), GRE®, LSAT®, GMAT® or similar examinations.

PSAT® is a registered trademark of the College Entrance Examination Board and the National Merit Scholarship Corporation neither of which sponsors or endorses this book; SAT® is a registered trademark of the College Board which neither sponsors nor endorses this book; GRE®, AP® and Advanced Placement® are registered trademarks of the Educational Testing Service which neither sponsors nor endorses this book, GMAT® is a registered trademark of the Graduate Management Admissions Council which is neither affiliated with this book nor endorses this book, LSAT® is a registered trademark of the Law School Admissions Council which neither sponsors nor endorses this product. All rights reserved. "About this title" may belong to another edition of this title. Troilus and Cressida | Folger Shakespeare Library FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY 201 East Capitol Street, SE Washington, DC 20003 Open to the public every day except Thanksgiving and Christmas. January 24 – March 5, 2017 Stage Director Talk: As You Like It January 26, 2017 at 6:30 PM The Folger's online catalog is your first stop for finding items in our rich rare and modern materials collections.

The Folger is looking for exceptionally qualified individuals who are committed to the mission, vision, and values of our organization. You are here Buy the play Set during the Trojan War, Troilus and Cressida recounts the love affair of its title characters. Inside the besieged city of Troy, the Trojan prince Troilus is lovesick for Cressida. Cressida is drawn to Troilus, too, and her uncle, Pandarus, brings them together. In the Greek camp outside, Cressida's father, Calchas, asks that Cressida be brought to him in return for the help he has given the Greeks. The morning after the lovers’ night together, Cressida is exchanged for a Trojan prisoner and taken to the camp by the Greek warrior Diomedes. The great Trojan warrior Hector, Troilus’s brother, engages in single combat with the Greek Ajax, a fight that ends inconclusively. Hector and Troilus join the Greeks for a feast. Cressida, meanwhile, is seduced by Diomedes. Distraught at Cressida's betrayal, Troilus fights Diomedes and others. Patroclus, favorite of the Greek warrior Achilles, dies in battle.

Achilles fights with and loses to Hector, who is then, on Achilles’s orders, dishonorably slain. Grieving, Troilus and the other Trojans return to Troy. Early printed texts Troilus and Cressida exists in two different early versions, both of which have complicated histories, although the textual variants are not significant enough for most readers to notice. The play was first published in 1609 as a quarto that exists in two different states.

The earlier state (Qa) has a title page describing the play as a "Historie" published "As it was acted by the Kings Majesties servants at the Globe." The second state (Qb), however, has a title page that does not refer to the play's performance and includes a prefatory letter, " A never writer, to an ever reader ," that asserts that the play was "never stal'd with the Stage, never clapper-clawd with the palmes of the vulger." (Scholars are divided on the assertion that the play was never performed.) The play was then included in the 1623 First Folio (F1) as The Tragedie of Troylus and Cressida, albeit only after some confusion; a few copies of F1 survive without the play and it was never listed in the book's " Catalogue ," or table of contents. The play seems to have been intially slated to appear in the middle of the tragedies, just after Romeo and Juliet, and a few copies still include a leaf that has the ending of Romeo and Juliet on one side and the start of Troilus and Cressida on the other.

(The Folger's Fo.1 no.45 is one such copy.) But before the full play could be printed, there was apparently a change of plans. The play was moved to appear after the last play in the history section, Henry VIII, and the first play in the tragedy section, Coriolanus. A prologue to the play (not in Q) was also added, facing the ending of Henry VIII. Troilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare, Colin Burrow, Colin Burrow: Penguin Books Ltd 9780141396415 Paperback - AbeBooks.com abebooks.com ISBN 10: 0141396415 / ISBN 13: 9780141396415 Used / Paperback / Quantity Available: 0 Available From More Booksellers View all copies of this book About the Book We're sorry; this specific copy is no longer available. AbeBooks has millions of books. We've listed similar copies below.

Description: BRAND NEW, Troilus and Cressida, William Shakespeare, Colin Burrow, Colin Burrow, Inspired by Homer's Iliad and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare's play explores heroism, love and betrayal against the backdrop of the Trojan War. This Penguin Shakespeare edition is edited by R. A. Foakes with an introduction by Colin Burrow. 'Lechery, still wars and lechery; nothing else holds fashion'. It is the seventh year of the Trojan War. The Greek army is camped outside Troy and Achilles - their military hero - refuses to fight. Inside the city Troilus, the Trojan King's son, falls in love with Cressida, whose father has defected to the Greek camp. In an exchange of prisoners the couple are split - they believe forever. The honour of lovers and soldiers is tested as a fierce battle begins and heroes must prove their worth. This book contains a general introduction to Shakespeare's life and Elizabethan theatre, a separate introduction to the play, a chronology, suggestions for further reading, an essay discussing performance options on both stage and screen, and a commentary.

Bookseller Inventory # About this title: Book ratings provided by GoodReads : 3.35 avg rating • (5,515 ratings) Synopsis: This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.

Product Description&colon; Webster's paperbacks take advantage of the fact that classics are frequently assigned readings in English courses. By using a running English-to-Hindi thesaurus at the bottom of each page, this edition of Troilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare was edited for three audiences. The first includes Hindi-speaking students enrolled in an English Language Program (ELP), an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) program, an English as a Second Language Program (ESL), or in a TOEFL? or TOEIC? preparation program. The second audience includes English-speaking students enrolled in bilingual education programs or Hindi speakers enrolled in English-speaking schools. The third audience consists of students who are actively building their vocabularies in Hindi in order to take foreign service, translation certification, Advanced Placement? (AP?) or similar examinations. By using the Webster's Hindi Thesaurus Edition when assigned for an English course, the reader can enrich their vocabulary in anticipation of an examination in Hindi or English. TOEFL?, TOEIC?, AP? and Advanced Placement? are trademarks of the Educational Testing Service which has neither reviewed nor endorsed this book. All rights reserved. "About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

Bibliographic Details Rating [?] Book Description Penguin Books Ltd, United Kingdom, 2015. Paperback. Book Condition: New. 198 x 129 mm. Language: English . Brand New Book. Inspired by Homer s Iliad and Chaucer s Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare s play explores heroism, love and betrayal against the backdrop of the Trojan War. This Penguin Shakespeare edition is edited by R. A. Foakes with an introduction by Colin Burrow. Lechery, still wars and lechery; nothing else holds fashion It is the seventh year of the Trojan War. The Greek army is camped outside Troy and Achilles - their military hero - refuses to fight. Inside the city Troilus, the Trojan King s son, falls in love with Cressida, whose father has defected to the Greek camp. In an exchange of prisoners the couple are split - they believe forever. The honour of lovers and soldiers is tested as a fierce battle begins and heroes must prove their worth.

This book contains a general introduction to Shakespeare s life and Elizabethan theatre, a separate introduction to the play, a chronology, suggestions for further reading, an essay discussing performance options on both stage and screen, and a commentary. Bookseller Inventory # APG9780141396415 Rating [?] Book Description Penguin Books Ltd, United Kingdom, 2015. Paperback. Book Condition: New. 198 x 129 mm. Language: English . Brand New Book. Inspired by Homer s Iliad and Chaucer s Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare s play explores heroism, love and betrayal against the backdrop of the Trojan War. This Penguin Shakespeare edition is edited by R. A. Foakes with an introduction by Colin Burrow. Lechery, still wars and lechery; nothing else holds fashion It is the seventh year of the Trojan War. The Greek army is camped outside Troy and Achilles - their military hero - refuses to fight. Inside the city Troilus, the Trojan King s son, falls in love with Cressida, whose father has defected to the Greek camp.

In an exchange of prisoners the couple are split - they believe forever. The honour of lovers and soldiers is tested as a fierce battle begins and heroes must prove their worth. This book contains a general introduction to Shakespeare s life and Elizabethan theatre, a separate introduction to the play, a chronology, suggestions for further reading, an essay discussing performance options on both stage and screen, and a commentary. Bookseller Inventory # APG9780141396415 An "Iliad" Play — Utah Shakespeare Festival An "Iliad" Play By Stephanie Chidester Peter Levi speculates that the Bard may have written Troilus and Cressida in response to audience demand “for an Iliad play" (The Life and Times of William Shakespeare [New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998], 234). This notion is not without merit; the story of the siege of Troy was “well known and . . .

, widely disseminated” by the end of the sixteenth century, and, in addition, Chapman’s English translation of the Iliad made its appearance in 1598, redoubling current interest in Homer’s account of the Trojan War (Kenneth Palmer, “Introduction,” The Arden Shakespeare: Troilus and Cressida [London: Methuen, 1982], 22), If Levi is right and Shakespeare wrote Troilus and Cressida in answer to popular demand, the Bard met the request in much the same way he did when, according to legend, he was asked to write a play showing Falstaff in love: Troilus and Cressida is no more a faithful dramatic rendition of Homer’s Iliad than The Merry Wives of Windsor is a depiction of Falstaff fallen prey to Cupid. In fact, Shakespeare’s play might be summed up as Homer meets Chaucer and Ovid.

While the play shares its setting and most of its characters with the Iliad those characters are also influenced by medieval notions of chivalry and courtly love (borrowed largely from Chaucer’s long poem Troilus and Criseyde), and the whole play is finished with a thick varnish of mockery. Audiences are often disconcerted by the medieval touches in the play. Aeneas sounds very like a knight in a tournament when he delivers Hector’s challenge to the Greeks, and the challenge itself is redolent of courtly love philosophy: “Hector... will tomorrow with his trumpet call / Midway between your tents and walls of Troy / To rouse a Grecian that is true in love. I If any come, Hector shall honour him: / If none, he’ll say in Troy, when he retires, / The Grecian dames are sunburnt and not worth I The splinter of a lance” (1.3.272, 276—82).

Furthermore, the plot concerning Troilus and Cressida’s ill-fated love (which Shakespeare takes from Chaucer, who, in turn, draws on Boccaccio) was inserted during the Middle Ages, in order to make the story of the Trojan War more appealing to the audiences of the time. When Shakespeare is not transforming Homer’s characters into medieval knights and courtly lovers, he treats them humorously—if somewhat unkindly—in the style of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, one of Shakespeare’s favorite books. Quoting Golding’s translation of Ovid, Jonathan Bate says, “Ajax is a boasting ‘dolt and grossehead’, ‘slye Ulysses’ a slippery wordsmith ‘who dooth all his matters in the dark’. Ovid thus provides a precedent for Shakespeare’s debunking representation of them” (Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993], 109).

So, in Shakespeare’s play, Ajax is a comic figure “valiant as the lion, churlish as the bear, slow as the elephant” (1.2.20—21), a “beef-wirred lord” (2.1.12) who is “bought and sold among those of any wit” (2.1.49—50); Achilles is a petulant hulk who spends far too much time sulking in his tent and whose brain, though not quite “as barren I As banks of Libya,” is “dry enough” (1.3.327—28); Agamemnon, likewise, is “an honest fellow enough.. but he has not so much brains as ear-wax” (5.1.50-2). The war itself receives similar treatment. A sense of weariness pervades both camps: Agamemnon chastises his commanders, who (unreasonably, he thinks) are feeling discouraged after “a seven-years’ siege” for which they have little to show (1.3.12).

As for the Trojans, Hector, who wants to have done with the war, says Helen “is not worth what she doth cost the keeping” (2.2.52), and he further argues, “If Helen then be wife to Sparta’s king, / As it is known she is, these moral laws / Of nature and of nations speak aloud / To have her back return’d” (2.2.184—87). Paris and Troilus are the only Trojans who have any enthusiasm left for the war, Paris because he wants to keep Helen, and Troilus only because he believes in seeing a project through to the finish, regardless of the cost. But even Troilus is reluctant to fight and sees the senselessness of the war: “Fools on both sides, Helen must needs be fair / When with your blood you daily paint her thus” (1.2.90-1). In addition, the clashes of the armies are trivialized: “The heroes’ return from battle he [Panderus] describes sportively, like a return from hunting or a game of football . . . but the common soldiers are dismissed as Asses, fools, dolts!

chaff and bran’” (Levi 235). And, of course, Thersites--that most unwarriorlike of Greeks thoroughly undercuts both the war and “the heroism of brute force” (Reuben Brower, Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman Heroic Tradition [Oxford, 1971], 123). A character three parts Timon of Athens and one part Feste, Thersites wanders from tent to tent, calling everyone fools or worse and demonstrating the truth of his insults. Shakespeare handles the love story much as he does the war. Troilus and Cressida’s struggles can be seen as a harsher, more cynical rake on Romeo and Juliet (which was also strongly influenced by Chaucer’s poem); both plays begin with a young man sighing over an unobtainable lady. The young man, employing a coarse-minded go-between to plead his case, eventually wins the lad's love; after exchanging words of love (and, in the case of Romeo and Juliet, marriage vows), the couple secretly consummates the relationship. Events conspire against the lovers, they are separated, and they do not live happily ever after.

But the differences between the plays are more significant than the similarities. Cressida’s love for Troilus falls far short of Juliet’s for Romeo. Cressida is coy, wanting to prolong the courtship, and the nature of her interest in Troilus frequently seems more sexual than romantic. Her speech in act 1 scene 2 is occasionally bawdy, and her attitude toward love is decidedly cynical: “Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing. . . / Men prize the thing ungain’d more than it is” (1.2.292-94). In her first scene with Troilus, she says suggestively, “They say all lovers swear more performance than they are able” (3.2.83-4). Also, while in Chaucer the courtship takes a more reasonable pace, in Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida no sooner declare their love than they become lovers in deed, placing the emphasis once again on physical love. And, of course, their love is destroyed not by accident or fate but by Cressida’s inconstancy. This medieval tale of love and betrayal inevitably invites comparison with that of Paris and Helen and the war they began.

So Troilus and Cressida is much more than the sum of its sources, a tossed salad of Homeric heroes, medieval knights, and courtly lovers. Shakespeare did not combine these elements merely out of blithe disregard for consistency and authenticity (though that may well be a factor); each unlikely component comments on its fellows, resulting in a “thoroughgoing critique of the ancient world” (Bate 109), and a satiric commentary on “heroes... marriage and.., manipulators” (Levi 234). When it is performed, this odd Shakespearean amalgam inspires a wide span of reactions from its audiences, ranging from aversion and devout wishes that someone could prove conclusively that it was authored by Jonson, Webster, Dekker--anyone but Shakespeare--to fascination and wonder that it isn’t staged more often. Such extreme responses speak to the power of the play; the worst condemnation of the play would, surely, be audience indifference. In Peter Levi’s words, “Troilus and Cressida is the least obvious of plays and the most ambivalent; it is irreducibly multiple. . . .

It is not easy to sum up this play, or to come to a well-founded verdict. . . . It . . . continues to attract as well as to puzzle and in some ways repel” (235, 238-9). × Love and War and Politics and Poetry: Enigmatic "Troilus and Cressida" is annual Shakespeare in the Park - theBurg Home » Culture » Love and War and Politics and Poetry: Enigmatic “Troilus and Cressida” is annual Shakespeare in the Park Love and War and Politics and Poetry: Enigmatic “Troilus and Cressida” is annual Shakespeare in the Park June 1, 2015 | by Barbara Trainin Blank Ian Potter, an actor and set designer with Gamut Theatre Group, was somewhat prepared for his role of Achilles in “Troilus and Cressida.” “I read ‘The Iliad,’ the epic poem attributed to Homer about the Trojan War, in high school,” Potter said.

“I was also in a college production of ‘The Trojan Women,’ a tragedy by Greek playwright Euripides.” The play is the annual outdoor production to be presented this month by the Harrisburg Shakespeare Company, which, together with Popcorn Hat Players Children’s Theatre, comprises Gamut. Jaded As usual, the author of “Troilus and Cressida,” William Shakespeare, brings his own take to the ancient conflict. Now in its seventh year, the war has reached a stalemate. Both sides, Trojans and Greeks alike, are questioning the value of continuing it. Meanwhile, Troilus, the young son of the Trojan House of Priam, and Cressida fall in love. Only, it isn’t feuds in an Italian city that thwart their romance—as per “Romeo and Juliet”—but political maneuvering. Cressida decides to make alliances that stand to compromise her virtue, explained Gamut Theatre Group’s artistic director, Clark Nicholson, who is staging the production. When Troilus sees Cressida flirting with a man in the Greek camp to which she has been traded, he considers her a whore, although no one refers to the beautiful Helen of Troy that way because of her social standing.

“Yet, it’s not even clear that Helen minds having been abducted to begin with, though that supposedly started the war,” said Nicholson. Troilus ends up a “very angry, very jaded young men, who becomes an angry fighter,” Nicholson said. “It’s not unlike a Romeo and Juliet dynamic, in which the two are doomed not to be together.” “Troilus and Cressida” is one of the Bard’s most enigmatic plays, encompassing both an ancient story—actually one of the oldest extant in Western literature—and modern cynicism. Part of it is drawn from a medieval source, a work by Chaucer about the two lovers. Variously characterized as a problematic comedy or a tragedy, it is “simultaneously comic, tragic and satiric, offering a chilling twist to the classical mythic heroes of antiquity,” Nicholson said. Moreover, while the undoing of Troilus and Cressida’s love is at the play’s core, in reality, it accounts for little stage time, which mostly focuses on the leaders of the Greek and Trojan forces. “The love story bookends the play,” rather than being central to it, noted Nicholson.

Worth Doing While not one of Shakespeare’s most popular works and not containing the memorable speeches a “Hamlet” does, “Troilus and Cressida” is a “beautiful piece of poetry,” full of metered and rhymed couplets, surrounding an epic adventure. That alone makes the play worth doing,” Nicholson added. “Troilus and Cressida” is a “very dark look at humanity, with people confusing love and lust and war being based more on covetousness and bragging rights than on honor,” Nicholson continued. “Shakespeare casts a satirical eye on his characters and not the most flattering look at war, although it’s not a wholesale condemnation.” Other cast members include Jared Calhoun as Troilus and Emily Samuelson as his love interest—both in their Gamut debuts; Amber Mann as Pandarus, the go-between for the lovers; Thomas Weaver as Ulysses; Sean Adams as Hector; Jeffrey Rensch as Agamemnon; Bernard Joseph as Aeneas; and Kathryn Miller as Helen. The multi-talented Potter also designed the sets, drawing inspiration from photographs of contemporary, war-ravaged Syria.

No Heroes Nicholson’s locale for the play is not ancient Greece or Troy but the present or not-too-distant future on the eastern side of the Mediterranean. The fighting is carried on by private military units, like Blackwater; each city-state of Greece (as opposed to a united Troy) has a different insignia. Besides the possible betrayal of Troilus by Cressida (whether to survive or for other reasons), there is a larger one: the leaders have tried to convince their people that the Trojan War was a life-and-death struggle. But it was really an “insult thing,” said Nicholson. “Like Samuel Johnson said, ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,’ and in that sense, the play is very timely and germane.” Great playwrights are not about polemics, at least not exclusively. “Shakespeare is not a pacifist, nor does he take a propaganda point of view—but rather, a realistic one,” Nicholson said. “It’s more like, if someone tells you to kill a man for God, country and apple pie, and you do it, maybe you should have been a little less gullible.

Shakespeare asks us to figure out and decide if this is patriotism.” In order to get Helen back, the Greeks are “willing to topple the city and the ground and loot as much possible,” added Potter. “Maybe that’s why Helen is more an idea, talked about” than active in the play. For all of its foundation in “The Iliad,” Potter points out that these are not really heroes. “There’s a lot of deceit and brutality,” he said. “If Shakespeare’s play is not totally anti-war, it does show it’s not a glorious thing and how ugly it can be.” The great Achilles, for example, no longer wishes to come out of his tent. “He is motivated to do so for personal reasons—when Patroclus (Rose Weber), who may have been his dear friend, family member or lover, is killed by Hector,” said Potter. In a breach of honor, Achilles then has others kill an unarmed and resting Hector. Yet, just as Romeo and Juliet fall in love amidst feuding, so do Troilus and Cressida amidst war. Something good may come from something brutal, though not necessarily with happy results, said Nicholson.

Gamut Theatre Group’s Harrisburg Shakespeare Company will perform “Troilus and Cressida” June 5 to 20 at the Levitt Pavilion in Reservoir Park at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free. For information, visit or call 717-238-4111. Continue Reading Tragedy and Gender Tragedy and Gender Angelica Lockerbie Class of 2014 Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida is a very controversial play about the betrayal of love and the betrayal of war. The play very much puts out the idea that love is all about sex, war is all about betrayal, women are allowed to speak, but that doesn’t mean they will be heard, and men are not as honorable as they seem. Understanding such gender related differences is difficult, but it can be done. Shakespeare proved that in clearly showing in the play how women and men have such different roles in life. His retelling of the Trojan War seems to instill Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's notion of "homosociality," in which social bonds between men are secured through the bodies of women.

The Greeks are fighting to restore the marriage bond that homosociality is guaranteed, such is the reason why Cressida was moved from the Trojan camp to the Greek camp suggesting that Cressida is in every way comparable to Helen. Hector had asked, “If we have lost so many tenths of ours, to guard a thing not ours, nor worth to us, (had it our name) the value of one ten, what merit's in that reason which denies the yielding of her up?” They say that Helen is “not ours” both because she is a Greek and a woman. During the prisoner exchange, in the love for his own men, Diomedes finds the only possible common ground with his enemy; he appeals to Paris on the grounds that the Trojans love Trojan men as much and in the same way as the Greeks love Greek men. It is a love that cannot easily be reduced to the geometries of homosociality. Fatigue with homosocial ties represents a desire for an idea of sexuality that leaves the orbit of homosociability.

According to Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, sexuality as such does not arise until the nineteenth century and then it does so as a personal identity--sexual desire becomes an inner truth that defines one as heterosexual or homosexual or any of the nineteenth-century species of sexuality Foucault discusses. To scholars of the early modern period, a period when desire had not yet evolved into personal identity, the notion of homosociality has seemed valuable precisely because it foregrounds the continuity between sexual relationships between men and social bonds between men screened by women. Sexual expression could then inhabit a whole range of social relationships not specifically designated as sexual. As Jonathan Goldberg puts it, in the early modern period "sexuality . . . does not stand apart as a separate domain." But by allowing warriors on both sides to openly express fatigue with homosocial ties, Shakespeare announces a desire to emphasize sexuality and produce knowledge about whatever distinguishes it from a whole range of social experiences. The ideas of sexuality that emerge in Troilus and Cressida occupy a tenuous space.

On the one hand, it must distance itself from the homosocial ties on which Shakespeare's patriarchal society depends; but on the other hand, it does not attack homosociality in a way that would make sex seem aggressively antisocial or even revolutionary. Shakespeare goes to considerable lengths to distinguish sexual ties from sodomy--the feared category of relationships dangerous to the homosocial order. But whereas in the modern context nonpublic but non-dangerous sexual relationships might simply be located in a private sphere characterized by intimacy, Shakespeare presents sexuality as a category of unique public relationships that are neither social nor antisocial, but which proceed at a tangent to normal social conventions, including homosocial ties. The relationship between Troilus and Cressida refracts this basic outline, seeming sexual because it is caught in the contradiction between an aristocratic worldview and the emerging norms of a humane relationship. When long-desired consummation with Cressida is finally within sight, Troilus imagines not secured sociable intimacy but something dangerous, something as dangerous as a battle that he is losing.

Imagining sex with his beloved, Troilus fears "That I shall lose distinction in my joys, / as doth a battle, when they charge on heaps / the enemy flying". But what seems like a simple case of the bourgeois fear of sex, in which the brutishness of sexual pleasure threatens the dignity of the individual (what Troilus calls his "distinction"), is in fact the opposite, the fear that an exalted style of love will threaten Troilus's brutish self. Troilus repeatedly claims to be utterly simple and without sophistication and asserts that Cressida is unimaginably more sophisticated than he. Troilus claims that the moment when his "watery palates taste indeed / Love's thrice-reputed nectar" will spell death: “Death, I fear me, Swooning destruction, or some joy too fine, too subtle-potent, tuned too sharp in sweetness, for the capacity of my ruder powers. I fear it much.” “Their loving well composed with gifts of nature, and flowing o'er with arts and exercise.

How novelty may move and parts with person, alas, a kind of godly jealousy-- Which, I beseech you, call a virtuous sin-- Makes me afeard.” In Troilus's eyes, Cressida belongs with the Greeks because she is as civilized as they are. René Girard glosses this passage as follows: "Everything Troilus says confirms the mimetic nature of his relationship to the Greeks. He certainly wants to acquire the talents and achievements that he admires in them. Which young man in love would not?" The only way out of fear and jealousy for Troilus would be "a Greek education," an education that Girard thinks impossible only because it would take more time than Troilus has at this moment of crisis. What I want to point out is that Troilus's fear of being cheated on is also a fear that the asocial, specifically sexual domain defined by the impossibility of entering into a humane relationship with Cressida, will be closed off as Cressida establishes functional ties with the Greeks (to whom she is "naturally" similar anyway).

To try to preserve the sexual bond, Troilus actively refuses to imagine a program of reeducation that might gradually undo the differences that divides him both from his beloved and from his enemy. Troilus treats the civility of Cressida and the Greeks as permanently out of reach, as though they possessed it by birth. This fact allows Troilus to preserve a sexual relationship with Cressida even after she moves into the Greek camp by declining to compete with or emulate the Greeks who now possess her. In Girard's view, loving Cressida is merely a cover for the love and aggression that Troilus bears toward the Greeks; Girard indicts Troilus for not loving Cressida enough. But in prescribing real heterosexuality as the antidote to a love that is directed toward one's enemies, Girard misses how the sexual relationship between Troilus and Cressida is essentially identical to the competition between men across the faultiness of civilized social life--but minus the social consequences. These experiences of sexuality help explain the speed and ease with which Cressida embraces the role of coquette once she has been removed to the Greek camp.

When the Greek leaders paw at her minutes after she has left her lover, Cressida coolly plays with their desires. Her coquettishness does not get her far (it elicits an aggressively misogynist reply from Ulysses), but Cressida may be making the most of an extremely weak hand. This realistic resignation sets Cressida up for the charge of faithlessness, yet there is a sense in which it allows her own desire for Troilus to remain more or less intact, something dangerous that resides inside the self and threatens at every turn to undermine even Cressida's tenuously held position in the Greek camp. This may account for Cressida's profound struggle with herself when she accedes to Diomedes request for a favor. What is surprising here is not that Cressida finally gives in but that she comes close to holding out; this would surely be something of a suicidal gesture. When Cressida tells Diomedes that the pledge he has just taken from her belonged to one "that loved me better than you will”, it sounds as if she is resigning herself to the claims of reality.

For if Troilus loved her better than Diomedes, Diomedes can certainly protect her better now that she is in the Greek camp. Cressida is essentially choosing a homosocial relationship over an erotic one. If she preserves an erotic connection to Troilus as an unrealized potential, she simultaneously condemns him to the homosocial exchanges from which he had felt pleasurably excluded under the pressure of his passion for Cressida. Witnessing Cressida's apparent betrayal while secretly spying on her and Diomedes, Troilus exits vowing revenge upon his rival. The problem of how one can enter into a relationship with pride defines one important component of the sexuality Shakespeare explores in this play. As is the case with Troilus and Cressida, social impossibility points to the specificity of the sexual. Ajax himself transfers the disgust Achilles makes him feel into the sexual register: "I do hate a proud man as I hate the engendering of toads”, an image also used by Othello to describe the disgust he feels at the thought of Desdemona's sexual infidelity. What makes pride and the encounter with pride look sexual is precisely that it makes society look impossible.

To encounter pride is to feel useless, to feel more or less supplementary, and to feel like the subject of a sexual relationship as Shakespeare seems to understand it. If fear marks a state of social emergency, then pride threatens to institutionalize that state of emergency by providing an alternative matrix of male-male relationships. While Achilles’ expression of pride defines all relationships with him as sexual, that pride itself exhibits an alarming tendency to replicate itself in others. Works Cited Foucault, Michel: The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, 3 vols. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978- ). Girard, René: "The politics of desire in Troilus and Cressida” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds. (New York and London: Methuen, 1985) Goldberg, Jonathan: ed., Queering the Renaissance (Durham, NC, and London: Duke UP, 1994). Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky: Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia UP, 1985).

Troilus and Cressida book by William Shakespeare | 70 available editions | Alibris Books Troilus (Legendary character) Inspired by Homer's Iliad and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare's play explores heroism, love and betrayal against the backdrop of the Trojan War. This Penguin Shakespeare edition is edited by R. A. Foakes with an introduction by Colin Burrow. 'Lechery, still wars and lechery; nothing else holds fashion' It is the seventh year of the Trojan War. The Greek army is camped outside Troy and Achilles - their military hero - refuses to fight. Inside the city Troilus, the Trojan King's son, falls in love with Cressida, ... Read More Inspired by Homer's Iliad and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare's play explores heroism, love and betrayal against the backdrop of the Trojan War. This Penguin Shakespeare edition is edited by R. A. Foakes with an introduction by Colin Burrow. 'Lechery, still wars and lechery; nothing else holds fashion' It is the seventh year of the Trojan War.

The Greek army is camped outside Troy and Achilles - their military hero - refuses to fight. Inside the city Troilus, the Trojan King's son, falls in love with Cressida, whose father has defected to the Greek camp. In an exchange of prisoners the couple are split - they believe forever. The honour of lovers and soldiers is tested as a fierce battle begins and heroes must prove their worth. This book contains a general introduction to Shakespeare's life and Elizabethan theatre, a separate introduction to the play, a chronology, suggestions for further reading, an essay discussing performance options on both stage and screen, and a commentary. Read Less High Rated Sellers Only (Above 4 stars) Highest Rated Sellers Only (5 stars only) Shipping Attribute

Question: Shakespeare's play of Greek/Trojan war, love and betrayal is Troilus and (who)?
Answer: Cressida