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). × Where Are the Heroes and Lovers? — Utah Shakespeare Festival Where Are the Heroes and Lovers? Where Are the Heroes and Lovers? By Diana Major Spencer "Eternall reader, you haue heere a new play, neuer stal'd with the Stage, neuer clapper-clawd with the palmes of the vulger," begins the 1609 quarto of Troilus and Cressida. This lack of stage history continued until 1898, claims Anne Barton, in The Riverside Shakespeare ([Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974], 443), suggesting, perhaps, that potential producers quail before the most troubling, as well as the most fascinating, aspect of this play: its tone.

The setting, the siege of Troy, preserved as the seminal epic of Western heroic tradition, is reduced by Thersites, "a slave whose gall coins slanders like a mint" (1.3.193), to a "war for a placket" (2.3.20), for which "all the argument is a whore and a cuckold" (2.3.72-73). Shakespeare leaves no mystery as to the tone of his play: It is sordid and cynical, offering no redeeming social value and no standards to emulate, unless by very negative example. The same events taste otherwise to other palates. The earliest telling of this epic story begins with Cressida's leaving Troy and generates sympathy for the separated lovers. Boccaccio includes the complicated wooing and reiterates the sympathetic parting, though he does end by condemning unfaithful women. Chaucer's rendition, Troilus and Criseyde, presents the primary characters as more complex and more sympathetic. Criseyde faces a genuine dilemma between her attraction to Troilus and her concern for reputation.

With her father's treachery, she is ostracized in Troy and has few options and few friends. Unlike Shakespeare's "broker-lackey," who revels in the salaciousness of his role, Chaucer's Pandarus weighs his responsibility as guardian for Cressida against his concern for her isolation and loneliness and his loyalty to Troilus. In the eighteenth century, Dryden rewrote Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida in order to correct its gross deficiencies by supplying the Aristotelian unities and Augustan sensibilities our primitive bard could not muster in his uneducated ignorance. Consequently, Cressida remains faithful to Troilus, she and her father are rescued from the Greeks, and, when her fidelity is questioned, she kills herself rather than live with a stained reputation. Shakespeare, on the other hand, thwarts any impulse of sympathy toward his characters. Cressida, unlike Chaucer's more delicate creation, uses reticence, not to weigh a dilemma, but to inflame a lovesick prince.

Her first dialogue with Pandarus betrays callousness, and her closing soliloquy of 1.2 reveals that she's highly interested in Troilus, but holding back only to redouble Pandarus' efforts and Troilus' desires. Cressida's sorriest moment occurs when she gives the sleeve, Troilus' token of undying devotion, to Diomedes. Her protestations to Diomedes about her lost love might be interpreted as remorse except for three facts: First, she told us in 1.2 that resisting heightens a man's passion. Second, in 5.2, with Thersites under one bush and Troilus and Ulysses under another, when she snatches back the sleeve and asks Diomedes to stay away, Thersites sneers, "Now she sharpens. Well said, whetstone!" (75). And third, when Diomedes says he's had enough teasing, she solidifies her invitation (105). No hope remains that Cressida might warrant sympathy.

Another character one hopes to admire is the great Homeric hero, Hector, but as early as 2.2 he trades right and wrong for fame and reputation. "She is not worth what she doth cost / The keeping," he tells Troilus of Helen (2.2.51-52). "Value dwells not in particular will. / It holds his estimate and dignity / As well wherein 'tis precious of itself/ As in the prizer" (2.2.53-56); in other words, the eye of the beholder is not the sole arbiter of value. Troilus and Paris argue for Helen. Hector counters that their reasoning leads more "To the hot passion of distemp'red blood / Than to make up a free determination / 'Twixt right and wrong" (2.2.168-71). Hector's explanation of right and wrong resembles Ulysses's earlier discussion of cosmic order: "Nature craves / All dues be rend'red to their owners," says Hector; "now, / What nearer debt in all humanity / Than wife is to the husband? . . .

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. . . . Hector's opinion/ Is this in way of truth" (2.2.173-89). Nevertheless, he concludes, our reputations among men increase by fighting to keep her; therefore, right and wrong be damned in favor of fame and glory. He then goes into battle only to be slaughtered in a most unheroic fashion. Although he dismissed Troilus's charge of a "vice of mercy" in him (5.3.37) as mere "fair play" (5.3.43), and although he spared his cousin Ajax, the out-of-breath Achilles, and even the "scurvy railing knave" and "filthy rogue" Thersites (5.4.28-29), Hector falls prey to his lust for the splendid armor of a nameless Greek. He kills the Greek, removes his armor, then is impaled on all sides by Achilles's Myrmidons as he rests.

Ironically, the words he utters over his trophy—"Most putrefied core, so fair without" (5.8.1-2)—describe most characters in the play; the rest are also putrefied within, but lack external beauty as well. Thersites, for instance, "a deformed and scurrilous Greek," has no claim to either sympathy or heroics. He explicates both character and action, thereby pulling the entire story to his level where all human motivation is lechery, which leads only to "the bone-ache." He is also Shakespeare's greatest virtuoso name-caller, with multiple labels and insults for everyone, most involving putrefaction and sexual disease. At the time we want the nastiness resolved and ended, Thersites provokes more throughout act five: scene one, with particular reference to Diomedes, who "keeps a Troyan drab" (i.e., Cressida), "nothing but lechery!

all incontinent varlots!" (5.1.96-98); scene two, after the sleeve-scene between Diomedes and Cressida, "Lechery, lechery, still wars and lechery" (5.2.194-96); scene four, "I would fain see . . . that same young Troyan ass, that loves the whore there, . . . send that Greekish whoremasterly villain with the sleeve back to the dissembling luxurious drab" (5.4.2-9). Later, "What's become of the wenching rogues? I think they have swallow'd one another. I would laugh at that miracle—yet in a sort lechery eats itself" (33-35). In 5.7, he sees Menelaus and Paris fight: "The cuckold and the cuckold-maker are at it. Now, bull! now, dog! . . . The bull has the game, ware horns ho!" (5.7.9-12).

Finally, he cautions one of Priam's bastards: "If the son of a whore fight for a whore, he tempts judgment" (21-22). Thersites then disappears, leaving the stage to a revolted Troilus, who blames Pandarus and his ilk for human misery; and Pandarus himself, who becomes the epilogue, alone on stage lamenting the lot of "traitors and bawds" (5.10.37). His closing lines, bereft of remorse or redemption, mourn the "hold-door trade," confess his own bone-ache, and promise to spend the next two months spreading his diseases which, at his death, he will bequeath to us. In case we haven't understood the relentlessly negative tone of this play, Shakespeare's last word is "diseases." × SparkNotes: Troilus and Cressida: Act I, Scenes i-ii Act I, Scenes i-ii Act I, Scene iii Summary The play opens with the entrance of the Prologue, an actor dressed as a soldier, who gives us the background to the story, which takes place during the Trojan War.

Immortalized in Greek mythology and Homer's Iliad, the war occurs because a Trojan prince, Paris, steals the beautiful Helen from her husband, King Menelaus of Sparta, and carries her home to Troy with him. In response, Menelaus gathers all of his fellow Greek kings, and together they sail to Troy, hoping to capture the city and reclaim Helen. The play's story, the Prologue informs us, begins in the middle of the conflict, after the siege of Troy has been ongoing for seven years. Within the walls of Troy, Prince Troilus complains to Pandarus that he is unable to fight because of heartache—he is desperately in love with Pandarus's niece, Cressida, and praises her beauty to the skies. (Cressida's father, a Trojan priest, has betrayed his city and gone over to the Greeks.) Pandarus complains that he has been doing his best to further Troilus's pursuit of his niece, and that he has received small thanks for his labors. After he departs, Troilus remarks that Pandarus has been growing irritable lately, but that in order to win Cressida, he must continue to work through her uncle.

As he ponders, the Trojan commander Aeneas dashes in, bringing word from the battlefield that Paris has been wounded in combat with Menelaus. As the noise of battle comes in from offstage, Troilus agrees to join his Trojan comrades on the field. In another part of the city, Cressida converses with her servant, who recounts how a Greek warrior named Ajax, a valiant but stupid man, managed to overcome the great Trojan prince Hector the previous day, and that Hector is fighting furiously because of this defeat. (Ajax, despite being Greek, is Hector's nephew.) Cressida is joined by Pandarus, and they discuss the Trojan princes, with Pandarus taking the unlikely position that Troilus is a greater man than Hector. As they converse, several Trojan lords pass by them returning from battle, including Antenor, Aeneas, Hector, and Paris; Pandarus praises each one, but tells his niece that none of them can match Troilus. Finally, Troilus passes, and Pandarus crows that "had I a sister were a grace, or a daughter a goddess, he should take his choice. O admirable man!" (I.ii.244-46).

He then leaves Cressida, promising to bring a token from Troilus. Alone, Cressida remarks that while she returns Troilus's feelings, she is holding him off; she is enjoying his pursuit of her. Commentary The appearance of the Prologue, with his brief account of how the Greek kings have sailed to Troy to sack the city and recapture the stolen Helen, is a reminder of the dependence of this play on classical mythology. Also, by its very brevity, it indicates the high degree of familiarity that Shakespeare's audience would have had with this mythology, since the Prologue does not bother to give more than a few background details before leaping into the play itself. Before the action begins, however, the audience is offered this thought: "Like or find fault; do as your pleasures are; / Now good or bad, 'tis but the chance of war" (Prologue, 30- 31). This idea—that "the chance of war" is stronger than "good or bad"—dominates a play in which heroism and nobility are consistently undermined by baser qualities, a play in which lust and brutality rule the day.

Indeed, while the setting—the Trojan War—might lead the audience to expect a traditional heroic epic, the Prologue's admonition foreshadows the fact that, in Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare has actually constructed a deliberately anti- heroic story. Troilus, in these opening scenes, is a fairly typical lovesick Shakespearean hero: his plaintive sighs and mopings call to mind figures like Romeo in Romeo and Juliet and Orsino in Twelfth Night. Troilus's first conversation with Pandarus is important primarily because it establishes two key aspects of the romance: Pandarus's role as go-between, and the problem of Cressida's father, who is mentioned only briefly here but will later be the cause of the two lovers' separation. The first scene ends with Troilus being called away from his moping by the battle, and this intrusion of the political realm into his romance sets up one of the play's broad themes—the collision between personal interests and the needs of the state—that will return with a vengeance later on. Meanwhile, the conversation between Pandarus and Cressida illustrates the way heroic conventions are undermined in Troilus and Cressida.

In a standard heroic romance, Troilus would indeed be everything that Pandarus claims he is—noble, brave, handsome, courteous, and so on. But Shakespeare, by having Pandarus sing Troilus's praises, immediately calls into question the truth of those praises—is Troilus really great, we wonder, or is it just that Pandarus is trying to "sell" him to his niece? Meanwhile, the difficulties of structure in Troilus and Cressida are also evident here. As he does throughout the play, Shakespeare deliberately undercuts what should be a climactic scene: Troilus's appearance onstage with the other Trojan princes after the battle. Pandarus's praises, and the long delay before Troilus's arrival, make it seem as though the play is building toward a key moment—except that we have already seen Troilus, and so has Cressida, so there is nothing important about the scene! More Help Shakespeareances.com: Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Troilus and Cressida Oregon Shakespeare Festival , Elizabeth Stage/Allen Pavilion, Ashland, Ore.

Thursday, August 16, 2012, C–34&36 (front right corner, studio theater) Directed by Rob Melrose We'll likely never know what got into William Shakespeare when he decided to write Troilus and Cressida. After scoring commercial success with rom-coms ending in witty epilogues praising the audience and tragedies ending in dignified odes to the hero, Shakespeare wrote a play that defies category and ends in a diseased man threatening the audience with syphilis. Having pushed Elizabethan theater to its highest arc with Twelfth Night and Hamlet, he crafted a play that counters the conventions of his time but fits perfectly in our post-Brecht age. From left, Diomedes (Kevin Kenerly), Paris (Ramiz Monsef) and Aeneas (Fajer Al-Kaisi) prepare to make the trade of Cressida for the prisoner Antenor in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of Troilus and Cressida. Photo Jenny Graham, Oregon Shakespeare Fesival.

Largely ignored for more than 300 years, Troilus and Cressida is emerging as a true Shakespearean masterpiece, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's version, setting the play in Operation Iraqi Freedom, firmly establishes that stature. Like The Deer Hunter, this play has no dramatic arc. Like The Sopranos, it has no tidy resolutions. Rather, it is a character study with some of the most sharply drawn characters in the canon conversing in some of the sharpest verse Shakespeare ever wrote. Shakespeare's boldest stroke, though, was in how he portrayed the characters. Achilles, Ulysses, Agamemnon, Ajax, and Hector were mythological heroes for the Greeks, the Romans, and the Elizabethan English, too, yet Shakespeare drew them as petty, cynical, even cowardly. Such thinking about warrior heroes didn't gain wide traction until the latter half of the 20th century. Shakespeare wraps his version of Homer's Iliad around Chaucer's then-popular romance about Troilus and Cressida, but in recounting Cressida's betrayal of Troilus, Shakespeare mutes her motivation.

Damned by the heartbroken Troilus and the nasty cynic Thersites, Cressida didn't earn much sympathy from audiences until the past 50 years when, in post-feminism times, the fate of women civilians caught up in war became more fully understood. Troilus and Cressida has been labeled Shakespeare's anti-war play, his counterpoint to Henry V. But just as Henry V has passages condemning war's carnage, Troilus and Cressida proceeds in the footsteps of men who successfully argue for continuing the fight. The significant difference is the breadth and importance of the argument. Whereas Henry V skirts the question of why (that whole Salic Law speech by the Archbishop of Canterbury at the beginning of the play is all the justification), Troilus and Cressida sees both warring camps engaged in long discussions around that central question: What are we fighting for? Troilus and Cressida takes place in the seventh year of the Greek siege of Troy, and war weariness has set in on both sides. Both camps debate whether Helen's face is really worth the continuing loss of life and treasure.

Certainly, to our 21st century sensibilities, such instigation for war is just silly, especially compared to something like the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon. Yet, hardly seven years had passed since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the question of remaining in Afghanistan became an issue of the 2008 presidential campaign. No matter the reason to wage war, people through history seem to tire of the enterprise seven years on. In setting his Troilus and Cressida in Iraq at the height of Operation Iraqi Freedom, director Bob Melrose portrays the Greeks as U.S. military members and the Trojans as Iraqi soldiers and businessmen. The battle uniforms and gear created by costume designer Christal Weatherly are remarkably accurate to the eyes of Sarah, my retired Air Force wife (her only complaint was that Agamemnon, played by Rex Young, seemed awfully young to be a four-star general), and Hector’s challenge being proclaimed throughout the Greek camps by the Stars & Stripes newspaper is a nice detail, too. Nevertheless, this production is not an update of Shakespeare's play, per se.

As Troy was, historically, a Greek colony and the Trojans shared the same culture, Melrose's staging serves to accentuate the cultural divide between warring peoples superimposed on their shared humanity and principles. Despite the rap music and occasional hoorahs among the Greeks, the Islamic practices of the Trojans, and the drug use on both sides, this remains a text-centric production. We see the Trojan War of some 3,000 years ago and hear Shakespeare's lines written in the early 1600s played out by people we recognize from news accounts and Internet access or know as neighbors and colleagues. Sarah, for example, after watching Mark Murphey's gruff but cunningly common-sense Ulysses, identified him as a Marine general—and she's known quite a few. Some audiences might read a political bent in portraying the Greeks (duplicitous Achilles, over-weaning Ajax, cowardly Thersites, scheming Ulysses) as Americans and the Trojans (dignified Hector, innocent romantic Troilus, royal Priam) as Iraqis.

When, for example, Troilus warns Cressida that the Greeks are great seducers, I had to smile at the fact that these Greeks were U.S. service members and the inference, for me, of how American soldiers have notoriously romanced women in every theater in which they've been engaged. But you can't take such inferences too far: Shakespeare won't let you. He offers no right or wrong in this play, and all of his characters are shaded. From left, Troilus (Raffi Barsoumian), Pandarus (Barzin Akhavan) and Cressida (Tala Ashe). Photo by Jenny Graham, Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The noble romantic Troilus (Raffi Barsoumian) engages in premarital sex with Cressida (understudy Brittany Brook), which doesn’t separate him much from his wife-stealing brother, Paris (Ramiz Monsef). Cressida, of course, professes undying loyalty only to betray Troilus in her first test—but, man, what a test, stuck among the testosterone-fueled soldiers beseiging her city.

Her uncle Pandarus (Barzin Akhavan) brings Troilus and Cressida together with the best of intentions for his niece and friend, but he does everything with a licentious leer. Cressida's father, Calchas (Bernard White) works in the employ of the Greeks (a la an interpreter), and he is the one who engineers the exchange of the Trojan Antenor, captured by the Greeks, for Cressida, who then becomes the property of Diomedes. Calchas is seen as a traitor by the Trojan Iraqis, but the American Greeks would regard his kind as heroes. We could denounce him as a terrible father for the arrangement he forces on his daughter, or we could commend him for getting his daughter to a safer place with greater career opportunities. Diomedes (Kevin Kenerly) wants the sex, and he allows Cressida to be bandied about by the other Greek generals for kisses, but he also steps in as her protector. Ajax (Elijah Alexander) may be overproud and underintelligent, but he’s loyal and brave, too. Achilles (Peter Macon) may be duplicitous, but he’s devoted to those he loves.

Thersites is a cowardly scab and, in Michael Elich’s intense rendering, a drug dealer and cokehead, but he functions as the play’s allowed fool, dispensing honest observations on the warriors and their war. Hector (also played by Bernard White) may be dignified, but to a foolish extreme. Troilus chides him for “the vice of mercy,” Hector’s penchant for letting those he defeats go free, and this habit of his does end up getting him killed. Paris is a coke-snorting playboy prince fashioned after Saddam’s sons. And Helen? She may be gorgeous (and Brook Parks in a metallic gold bikini certainly is), but this spoiled lay-about would be willing to jump into the lap of any man with the wealth and inebriates to sate her many appetites. In Helen’s one scene, Shakespeare goes to great length to set her up against the image of Cressida, a native who Troy is about to give up to the Greeks (but they would never give Helen back). Interesting that time has been kinder to Helen than to Cressida, and Shakespeare seems to be questioning this tradition—after all, whose infidelity started the war?

We are invested in these characters not only because of this production’s Iraq War setting but also because the actors themselves are wholly invested in their roles. Every movement and expression is nuanced, every Shakespearean line delivered true to the verse and true to their American/Iraqi context, too. White turns in an extraordinary and intriguing performance as Hector, a portrait of stillness in dignity. His gray beard, lined face, and slight physique belie his fighting skills as he relies on his speed, agility, and mental acuity to overcome the brute Ajax and the daunting Achilles, both thrice Hector’s heft. Anchoring the ensemble is Barsoumian’s Troilus, a romantic soul yearning for a semblance of a normal life in a landscape under siege. Even though he questions the war’s validity, he fights on; even though he believes Cressida is unobtainable, he loves on. In the end, his sincere trust in honor and truth are swallowed up by his country’s political machinery and a war fought on behalf of an adulterous affair. Eric Minton A Play for All Ages Needs an Age to Play In Directing Overall One of the knocks on William Shakespeare is that he's too cerebral.

Guys who like their action and gals who like their romance unencumbered don't want to "work" at understanding Shakespeare's Elizabethan language and verse structure. I've long contended that it is theater directors who make Shakespeare too cerebral and poor acting that makes the language and verse structure encumbering. All of Shakespeare's plays are full of action and romance, and, when presented with total devotion to the text, they are emotionally, psychologically, physically, and intellectually stimulating in a way that makes them appealing to all strata and tastes of modern audiences. All of his plays except one: Troilus and Cressida. This one really is cerebral. I love the play, and it is rightfully emerging among critics as one of Shakespeare's masterpieces, but it is nonetheless a challenging play to stage and watch. It is a character study of a dozen uniquely and vividly drawn characters who spend talk-heavy scenes giving long speeches. The setting is a pause in the seventh year of the Greek siege of Troy, with the only combat coming briefly at the end: Even the centerpiece bout between Hector and Ajax seems more formulaic than intense and ends inconclusively.

It has a romantic plot that achieves hook-up halfway through and then dissipates not so much through tragic circumstances as dubious devotion. Its humor is so cynical and its plot so despairing that if it is supposed to be a comedy, as originally advertised, it is a disturbingly bitter one. It has mythological heroes and lovers, it has clowns and elders, and it has the most beautiful woman the world has ever known, all of whom are easier to despise than admire. In structure, it most resembles the Marlovian dramas that influenced Shakespeare's early works but were out of fashion by the time he wrote Troilus and Cressida, yet its poetry is sinuous and sublime. Jim Warren and the American Shakespeare Center tackle all of this with pure simplicity. The ASC way with its replica Blackfriars Playhouse is to present plays as close as possible to the methodology of Shakespeare's original company: no sets, no electronics, a small corps of well-trained, devoted actors who bring the texts to singular life even though they are doubling and tripling roles, and, most important of all, no concepts imposed on Shakespeare's texts.

This is the 30th Shakespeare play Warren has directed, and in his program notes he describes how he wants to go in the opposite direction of the "heavy-handed, single interpretation that defines [Troilus and Cressida] in simple ways for the audience." Instead, he set out to "mine the text for every juicy bit of ambiguity and serve up all the beautiful mess of humanity we can find. Shakespeare's greatness allows him to paint characters in ways that allow actors to give performances that defy labels and cause audience members to argue over who's right, who's wrong, who's the hero, who's the villain, and what the play/production is trying to say to us today." Hitherto, I've said "amen!" to this approach. When you do Shakespeare in Shakespeare's own theatrical way, it enlivens Shakespeare. But Troilus and Cressida resists this ideal; perhaps Shakespeare himself did not do the play in his own theatrical way, for it seems to have confounded the theater community of his time. Its quarto publication, advertised as a history and comedy, was printed with two title pages, the first saying it was acted many times, then a substitute one saying it was never acted at all.

In the First Folio it was inserted between the Histories and Tragedies with different page numbering, suggesting it was a late addition. Some scholars and critics consider Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare's most modern play, and I actually believe he may have time-traveled to the 1960s and was inspired by both Brecht and news coverage of the Vietnam War. Unable to prove this theory, I offer up the possibility that Shakespeare wrote a play specific to his mental state, questioning the romantic ideal and hero myth his society perpetuated, rather than writing a play for popular consumption and the staging conditions of the Globe. He wrote this play near the end of England's nine-year war with Ireland and shortly after one of his own heroes, Essex, had come home from that war in disgrace and led a revolt against the Queen. What was thoroughly personal then to Shakespeare has been thoroughly modern in succeeding ages. Some societies, such as the Victorians, didn't appreciate it: We do. Giving this play any historical setting while keeping true to the text, returns it to the playwright's own frame of mind, making it so accessible as to tap into the very matrix of your being.

This is the third production of Troilus and Cressida I've seen. The BBC/Time-Life version strove for a M*A*S*H aesthetic. The Royal Shakespeare Company's 1985 production set the play in the Crimean War, juxtaposing the formality of Victorian society and strict order of military conflict with the human consequences of war and politics. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival production last year set the play in modern Iraq, with the Greeks represented by the American military and the Trojans by Iraqis, striking an instant emotional chord in the audience while providing dramatic visual imagery to bolster the play's talk-heavy scenes. Warren's original practice version of Troilus and Cressida lacks such visceral connection. This factor is further compounded by a staging condition particular to this production, which is part of the ASC's 25th anniversary season. The company started as the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express, a touring troupe that could not count on having back stages. So, during performances in the early days, the actors sat on the outskirts of the stage and in the audience when they were not in scenes. In a nod to the company's history, this production uses that convention.

Costume designer Victoria Depew dresses the actors in gray sweats (the pants coming to just below the knees) and supplements these with leather breast plates and shin guards, capes, togas, and dresses, rust red representing the Trojans, green for the Greeks. Warren strived for ambiguity, and he succeeded maybe too well. Troilus's moment of despair initially generates laughs among the audience, not because Gregory Jon Phelps fails to nail the moment properly—his Troilus is thoroughly engaging throughout—but because the audience is emotionally if not intellectually lost. Nevertheless, Shakespeare's verse and this cast make this a memorable performance. Theater education programs at all levels should book a trip to Staunton, Virginia, this fall to observe these 12 actors play 18 archetypal characters with such subtle skills and full understanding of Shakespeare's verse. Phelps plays the young warrior and shy lover Troilus trying to navigate the physical conflicts of the field and the emotional conflicts in his heart.

Buff and energetic, he nonetheless scores the production's most arresting moments with his eyes as he stands up after each blindside strike at his psyche: the political blindside when Cressida is traded to the Greeks for a prisoner, the emotional blindside when he sees Cressida betray him, and the military blindside when Hector is killed. Lee Fitzpatrick plays Cressida as flirty and perhaps the experienced pre-Troilus lover the insightful Ulysses and Thersites take her for: "She will sing any man at first sight," Ulysses says, to which Thersites adds, "And any man may sing her, if he can take her clef. She's noted." She certainly does not seem to regard herself as a victim among the Greeks. John Harrell gives us a doting uncle Pandarus who sees his naughty innuendos as shows of affection. Harrell then puts on the green mantle and plays the super-cocky Ajax as the ultimate stupid jock. René Thornton Jr., acting in the fourth Troilus and Cressida of his career, gives Ulysses a subtle poignancy, his long speeches of wisdom carrying with them an undertone of political expedience.

He grounds Ulysses' personality in his line to Hector, referring to the original embassy in which Troy refused to yield up Helen to her husband: "Sir, I foretold you then what would ensue." Thornton says this so forcefully it echoes truth and serves to reflect on the man's foresight and forcefulness. Achilles is an egomaniac who wants worship for his abilities even as he refuses to show his abilities on the battlefield, but Benjamin Curns discovers a wounded spirit in the nearly invincible hero and gives credence to Achilles' devotion to those he loves, particularly Patroclus. Emily Brown plays Patroclus as a keenly aware young man; as Ulysses entwines Achilles in a philosophical conundrum, Brown's Patroclus watches, wary that his own relationship with Achilles might be unraveling before his eyes. Brown also plays Hector's wife, Andromecha, putting personal love of her husband ahead of his duty to the state. The debonairly handsome Dylan Paul gives us a debonairly handsome Paris with little depth. Intentional?

When Paul goes green, he completely transforms into a shriveled, wobbling Nestor and gives the old Greek general a bravado oozing from a man who knows his fighting years are long behind him. Nice moment when, as Paris, Paul mouths along to the Greek embassy's demands to return Helen—this Paris has heard it so many times before he knows it by rote. The statuesquely beautiful Tracie Thomason gives us a statuesquely beautiful Helen with little depth. Intentional? When Thomason goes green, she becomes the testosteronic Diomedes, but it's another role, that of Alexander, Cressida's servant, that displays this actress's far-ranging abilities. By playing Alexander with such effusive excitement, Thomason turns a throwaway character that shows up in only one scene into a personality etched in our experience. Josh Innerst gives Agamemnon a humorless aspect, a general who believes that in order to gain the respect of all these mythological heroes under his command he has to be ever authoritative in voice and posture. His counterpart, Hector, is more at ease with his command. Chris Johnston may be slight of build but he gives us a Hector great of character.

Whereas the Greek generals strut and pose, Johnston's Hector flows and effortlessly radiates an aura of nobility. Tim Sailer makes the minor character of Aeneas, a Trojan warrior, a major force in his scenes, and Allison Glenzer makes the Greek slave Thersites a slimy force in hers. Thersites is a combination of Twelfth Night's Feste and As You Like It's Jacques, and Glenzer balances the clowning and the cynicism in a formula that makes us laugh and cringe at the same time. When Glenzer goes rust red, it is to play Cassandra, the mentally unstable (but prophetic) sister to Hector. What Shakespeare wrote, this cast brings to vivid life. And though the production may lack a contextual resonance, the play's textual brilliance is on expert display here. Besides, when it comes to Shakespeare's emerging masterpiece Troilus and Cressida, my advice is to see it while you can: though befitting all ages, it doesn't make it to many stages.

'A great feast of languages': let's liberate Shakespeare from the RP accent | Stage | The Guardian How we staged Shakespeare 'A great feast of languages': let's liberate Shakespeare from the RP accent Director Jatinder Verma on Tara Arts’ multicultural production of Troilus and Cressida, which referenced the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, and how the delivery of Shakespeare’s words is still bedevilled by conventions Vincent Ebrahim and Nirmal Chandra Pandey in Tara Arts’s Troilus and Cressida in 1993 Photograph: Tara Arts/Battersea Arts Centre archive Monday 21 March 2016 04.00 EDT Last modified on Monday 21 March 2016 04.02 EDT Share on Messenger Close Troilus and Cressida is arguably the most cynical of Shakespeare’s plays – a cynicism born of its setting during the protracted Trojan war of Greek myth. It focuses on the love affair of Troilus and Cressida who, just after they consummate their love, are forced to accept their separation, as Cressida is handed over to the Greeks thanks to the treachery of her father.

It also explores the peevishness of the Greeks, whose mighty warrior Achilles is refusing to fight because he feels slighted. The Greeks come off as fantastically pragmatic and the Trojans are somewhat more civilised and flexible. I directed the play for Tara Arts in a co-production with Contact theatre in Manchester in 1993. At the time, the biggest political news was the breakup of the former Yugoslavia – and inherent in that breakup was a hitherto multicultural society under threat. I made the Trojans multicultural, in terms of the casting but also in the languages I used. There was the English text of Shakespeare himself, but we also made use of Hindi and of French, the backgrounds of the people involved. The Greeks were presented in a much more straightforward way. I was lamenting the fall of Troy (echoing the fall of multicultural Sarajevo ) and my staging sought to express that lament. William Shakespeare's handwritten plea for refugees to go online Read more My approach to the play was quite physical. We developed martial movements based on classical Indian dance, with accompanying rhythms provided by bamboo sticks striking the wooden stage floor.

There was a news report at the time of a young couple in Sarajevo – a Muslim and a Christian – who had desperately tried to maintain their love affair during the siege of the city and paid tragically for it. This seemed to me to strike at the heart of Troilus and Cressida – what war does to individuals, particularly young people. Suddenly these borders come up and they cannot maintain the lives that they were imagining for themselves. Trapped in the enemy Greek camp, Cressida, played by Yogesh Bhatt, finally succumbs to her new reality, crying out: “Troilus, farewell! One eye yet looks on thee / But with my heart the other eye doth see.” I had chosen Yogesh, a man, to play Cressida because I wanted to challenge the easier reading of the “weaker sex” that Cressida can otherwise offer. I thought one of the most poignant moments was the death of Hector – the greatest warrior among the Trojans, who knew they were fighting a wrong cause and yet felt honour-bound to champion his people. In some ways that death seems to sum up this clash of ways of looking at the world between the Greeks and the Trojans.

I had him placed in a ring of fire. The fire was lit to signify his death and at that point the Trojans assembled around him and showered him with rice. There was a twofold sense to it: the civilisation of Troy and what it represented going up in flames, but rice is also the food of life, so possibly something else could emerge from it. Watch a video on how actors from Shakespeare’s Globe took Hamlet to refugees in Calais In England, Shakespeare quite rightly has enormous status, but what comes with it is a sense that “we know best”. Yet when we look at Shakespeare over the centuries some of the best versions have been foreign versions. They’ve given us another insight into Shakespeare. It gets a lot more vexed when the foreignness is within. We at Tara were not a foreign troupe coming and doing the whole text in a foreign language ; we were and are British with foreign connections and with other languages. It seems to me that’s one of the great challenges in England at the moment. There is a multiplicity of languages and also therefore a multiplicity of ways of looking at the world , which clearly have a bearing on playing Shakespeare.

And yet Shakespeare is still bedevilled by conventions of how the language is to be approached – the “RP” (received pronunciation) approach. Such unspoken rules of the game are being challenged (rightly so) by the new sounds of English spoken by migrants and refugees today. RP or OP? That is the question Read more Today we are facing what was latent in the 90s, which is the rise of a particular kind of fundamentalism and the threat it poses to a sensibility of multiculturalism. We see that in all walks of life – in responses to the migrant crisis, for example, both here and across in Europe. If I were to do Troilus and Cressida again today I think I would be making similar decisions. There is a kind of culture that the Trojans represented that is much more consonant with what one would ideally want our lives to be, where we are crossing borders of language and culture. Shakespeareances.com: American Shakespeare Center's Troilus and Cressida American Shakespeare Center , Blackfriars Playhouse, Staunton, Va.

Friday, September 27, 2013, C–6&7 (center stalls) Directed by Jim Warren Gregory Jon Phelps as Troilus wearing the favor of Cressida, a glove, in his belt before going into battle in the American Shakespeare Center's production of Troilus and Cressida at the Blackfriars Playhouse. Photo by Pat Jarrett, American Shakespeare Center. One of the knocks on William Shakespeare is that he's too cerebral. Guys who like their action and gals who like their romance unencumbered don't want to "work" at understanding Shakespeare's Elizabethan language and verse structure. I've long contended that it is theater directors who make Shakespeare too cerebral and poor acting that makes the language and verse structure encumbering. All of Shakespeare's plays are full of action and romance, and, when presented with total devotion to the text, they are emotionally, psychologically, physically, and intellectually stimulating in a way that makes them appealing to all strata and tastes of modern audiences. However, Troilus and Cressida really is cerebral.

I love the play, and it is rightfully emerging among critics as one of Shakespeare's masterpieces, but it is nonetheless a challenging play to stage and watch. It is a character study of a dozen uniquely and vividly drawn characters who spend talk-heavy scenes giving long speeches. The setting is a pause in the seventh year of the Greek siege of Troy, with the only combat coming briefly at the end: Even the centerpiece bout between Hector and Ajax seems more formulaic than intense and ends inconclusively. It has a romantic plot that achieves hook-up halfway through and then dissipates not so much through tragic circumstances as dubious devotion. Its humor is so cynical and its plot so despairing that if it is supposed to be a comedy, as originally advertised, it is a disturbingly bitter one. It has mythological heroes and lovers, it has clowns and elders, and it has the most beautiful woman the world has ever known, all of whom are easier to despise than admire. In structure, it most resembles the Marlovian dramas that influenced Shakespeare's early works but were out of fashion by the time he wrote Troilus and Cressida, yet its poetry is sinuous and sublime.

Jim Warren and the American Shakespeare Center tackle all of this with pure simplicity. The ASC way with its replica Blackfriars Playhouse is to present plays as close as possible to the methodology of Shakespeare's original company: no sets, no electronics, a small corps of well-trained, devoted actors who bring the texts to singular life even though they are doubling and tripling roles, and, most important of all, no concepts imposed on Shakespeare's texts. This is the 30th Shakespeare play Warren has directed, and in his program notes he describes how he wants to go in the opposite direction of the "heavy-handed, single interpretation that defines [Troilus and Cressida] in simple ways for the audience." Instead, he set out to "mine the text for every juicy bit of ambiguity and serve up all the beautiful mess of humanity we can find. Shakespeare's greatness allows him to paint characters in ways that allow actors to give performances that defy labels and cause audience members to argue over who's right, who's wrong, who's the hero, who's the villain, and what the play/production is trying to say to us today." Hitherto, I've said "amen!" to this approach.

When you do Shakespeare in Shakespeare's own theatrical way, it enlivens Shakespeare. But Troilus and Cressida resists this ideal; perhaps Shakespeare himself did not do the play in his own theatrical way, for it seems to have confounded the theater community of his time. Its quarto publication, advertised as a history and comedy, was printed with two title pages, the first saying it was acted many times, then a substitute one saying it was never acted at all. In the First Folio it was inserted between the Histories and Tragedies with different page numbering, suggesting it was a late addition. Some scholars and critics consider Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare's most modern play, and I actually believe he may have time-traveled to the 1960s and was inspired by both Brecht and news coverage of the Vietnam War. Unable to prove this theory, I offer up the possibility that Shakespeare wrote a play specific to his mental state, questioning the romantic ideal and hero myth his society perpetuated, rather than writing a play for popular consumption and the staging conditions of the Globe.

He wrote this play near the end of England's nine-year war with Ireland and shortly after one of his own heroes, Essex, had come home from that war in disgrace and led a revolt against the Queen. What was thoroughly personal then to Shakespeare has been thoroughly modern in succeeding ages. Some societies, such as the Victorians, didn't appreciate it: We do. Giving this play any historical setting while keeping true to the text, returns it to the playwright's own frame of mind, making it so accessible as to tap into the very matrix of your being. This is the fourth production of Troilus and Cressida I've seen. The BBC/Time-Life version strove for a M*A*S*H aesthete. The Royal Shakespeare Company's 1985 production set the play in the Crimean War, juxtaposing the formality of Victorian society and strict order of military conflict with the human consequences of war and politics. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival production last year set the play in modern Iraq, with the Greeks represented by the American military and the Trojans by Iraqis, striking an instant emotional chord in the audience while providing dramatic visual imagery to bolster the play's talk-heavy scenes.

Warren's original practice version of Troilus and Cressida lacks such visceral connection. This factor is further compounded by a staging condition particular to this production, which is part of the ASC's 25th anniversary season. The company started as the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express, a touring troupe that could not count on having back stages. So, during performances in the early days, the actors sat on the outskirts of the stage and in the audience when they were not in scenes. In a nod to the company's history, this production uses that convention. Costume designer Victoria Depew dresses the actors in gray sweats (the pants coming to just below the knees) and supplements these with leather breast plates and shin guards, capes, togas, and dresses, rust red representing the Trojans, green for the Greeks. Warren strived for ambiguity, and he succeeded maybe too well. Troilus's moment of despair initially generates laughs among the audience, not because Gregory Jon Phelps fails to nail the moment properly—his Troilus is thoroughly engaging throughout—but because the audience is emotionally if not intellectually lost. Nevertheless, Shakespeare's verse and this cast make this a memorable performance.

Theater education programs at all levels should book a trip to Staunton, Virginia, this fall to observe these 12 actors play 18 archetypal characters with such subtle skills and full understanding of Shakespeare's verse. Phelps plays the young warrior and shy lover Troilus trying to navigate the physical conflicts of the field and the emotional conflicts in his heart. Buff and energetic, he nonetheless scores the production's most arresting moments with his eyes as he stands up after each blindside strike at his psyche: the political blindside when Cressida is traded to the Greeks for a prisoner, the emotional blindside when he sees Cressida betray him, and the military blindside when Hector is killed. Lee Fitzpatrick plays Cressida as flirty and perhaps the experienced pre-Troilus lover the insightful Ulysses and Thersites take her for: "She will sing any man at first sight," Ulysses says, to which Thersites adds, "And any man may sing her, if he can take her clef. She's noted." She certainly does not seem to regard herself as a victim among the Greeks.

John Harrell gives us a doting uncle Pandarus who sees his naughty innuendos as shows of affection. Harrell then puts on the green mantle and plays the super-cocky Ajax as the ultimate stupid jock. René Thornton Jr., acting in the fourth Troilus and Cressida of his career, gives Ulysses a subtle poignancy, his long speeches of wisdom carrying with them an undertone of political expedience. He grounds Ulysses' personality in his line to Hector, referring to the original embassy in which Troy refused to yield up Helen to her husband: "Sir, I foretold you then what would ensue." Thornton says this so forcefully it echoes truth and serves to reflect on the man's foresight and forcefulness. Thersites (Allison Glenzer) makes a cynical point in the American Shakespeare Company production of Troilus and Cressida at the Blackfriars Playhouse. In the background, Chris Johnston playing Hector sits on the edge of the stage waiting for his next scene as the company returns to its early staging conventions. Photo by Pat Jarrett, American Shakespeare Center.

Achilles is an egomaniac who wants worship for his abilities even as he refuses to show his abilities on the battlefield, but Benjamin Curns discovers a wounded spirit in the nearly invincible hero and gives credence to Achilles' devotion to those he loves, particularly Patroclus. Emily Brown plays Patroclus as a keenly aware young man; as Ulysses entwines Achilles in a philosophical conundrum, Brown's Patroclus watches, wary that his own relationship with Achilles might be unraveling before his eyes. Brown also plays Hector's wife, Andromecha, putting personal love of her husband ahead of his duty to the state. The debonairly handsome Dylan Paul gives us a debonairly handsome Paris with little depth. Intentional? When Paul goes green, he completely transforms into a shriveled, wobbling Nestor and gives the old Greek general a bravado spunk oozing from a man who knows his fighting years are long behind him. Nice moment when, as Paris, Paul mouths along to the Greek embassy's demands to return Helen—this Paris has heard it so many times before he knows it by rote.

The statuesquely beautiful Tracie Thomason gives us a statuesquely beautiful Helen with little depth. Intentional? When Thomason goes green, she becomes the testosteronic Diomedes, but it's another role, that of Alexander, Cressida's servant, that displays this actress's far-ranging abilities. By playing Alexander with such effusive excitement, Thomason turns a throwaway character that shows up in only one scene into a personality etched in our experience. Josh Innerst gives Agamemnon a humorless aspect, a general who believes that in order to gain the respect of all these mythological heroes under his command he has to be ever authoritative in voice and posture. His counterpart, Hector, is more at ease with his command. Chris Johnston may be slight of build but he gives us a Hector great of character. Whereas the Greek generals strut and pose, Johnston's Hector flows and effortlessly radiates an aura of nobility. Tim Sailer makes the minor character of Aeneas, a Trojan warrior, a major force in his scenes, and Allison Glenzer makes the Greek slave Thersites a slimy force in hers.

Thersites is a combination of Twelfth Night's Feste and As You Like It's Jacques, and Glenzer balances the clowning and the cynicism in a formula that makes us laugh and cringe at the same time. When Glenzer goes rust red, it is to play Cassandra, the mentally unstable (but prophetic) sister to Hector. What Shakespeare wrote, this cast brings to vivid life. And though the production may lack a contextual resonance, the play's textual brilliance is on expert display here. Besides, when it comes to Shakespeare's emerging masterpiece Troilus and Cressida, my advice is to see it while you can: though befitting all ages, it doesn't make it to many stages.

Eric Minton Troilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate, Eric Rasmussen: Palgrave Macmillan 9780230272262 Paperback - AbeBooks.com abebooks.com ISBN 10: 0230272266 / ISBN 13: 9780230272262 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, Jonathan Bate, Eric Rasmussen, From the Royal Shakespeare Company -- a fresh new edition of Shakespeare's great tragedy of love and war THIS EDITION INCLUDES: * An illuminating introduction to Troilus and Cressida by award-winning scholar Jonathan Bate * The play - with clear and authoritative explanatory notes on each page * A helpful scene-by-scene analysis and key facts about the play * An introduction to Shakespeare's career and the Elizabethan theatre * A rich exploration of approaches to staging the play featuring photographs of key productions The most enjoyable way to understand a Shakespeare play is to see it or participate in it. This unique edition presents a historical overview of Troilus and Cressida in performance, recommends film versions, takes a detailed look at specific productions and includes interviews with two leading directors -- Trevor Nunn and Michael Boyd -- so that we may get a sense of the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible, a variety that gives Shakespeare his unique capacity to be reinvented and made 'our contemporary' four centuries after his death.

Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare plays offer an accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare's works for the twenty-first century. Bookseller Inventory # About this title: Book ratings provided by GoodReads : 3.35 avg rating • (5,529 ratings) Synopsis: From the Royal Shakespeare Company ? a fresh new edition of Shakespeare's great tragedy of love and war ? An illuminating introduction to Troilus and Cressida by award-winning scholar Jonathan Bate ? The play - with clear and authoritative explanatory notes on each page ? A helpful scene-by-scene analysis and key facts about the play ? An introduction to Shakespeare's career and the Elizabethan theatre ? A rich exploration of approaches to staging the play featuring photographs of key productions The most enjoyable way to understand a Shakespeare play is to see it or participate in it. This unique edition presents a historical overview of Troilus and Cressida in performance, recommends film versions, takes a detailed look at specific productions and includes interviews with two leading directors ? Trevor Nunn and Michael Boyd ?

so that we may get a sense of the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible, a variety that gives Shakespeare his unique capacity to be reinvented and made 'our contemporary' four centuries after his death. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare plays offer an accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare's works for the twenty-first century. Review&colon; One of Shakespeare's most notoriously difficult and cynical plays, labelled a "Problem Comedy", Troilus and Cressida has perplexed critics and theatre directors, and after Shakespeare's lifetime it was not performed again until 1907. In many ways the play's difficulty is a surprise; the story of Troilus and Cressida was a popular theme, drawn from Homer's Iliad and Chaucer's own Troilus and Criseyde, as was its classical setting, the Greek siege of Troy, led by Agamemnon, Achilles, Ajax, Diomedes and Ulysses. Within the walls of Troy, Prince Troilus falls madly in love with Cressida, daughter of the deserter Calchas.

His love is intense and frenetic--"I am giddy, expectation whirls round me," but turns to bitter disillusion when Cressida defects to the Greek camp and flirts with Diomedes. As the war and conflict over the abduction of Helen whirls around the doomed romance, the play delights in its complex syntax and cynical images of waste, decay, corruption and mutability, summed up in Ulysses' comment that, "Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all / To envious and calumniating time." The play's cynical open-ended quality has frustrated many readers, but gives the play a remarkably modern, contemporary sensibility. --Jerry Brotton "About this title" may belong to another edition of this title. Bibliographic Details

Question: Which Shakespeare play has the siege of Troy as its setting?
Answer: Troilus and Cressida