Troilus and Cressida
Troilus and CressidaShakespeare's tragicomedy of an aimless love in the midst of a futile war may be the last play he wrote before the death of Queen Elizabeth. It was entered in the Stationers' Register in February 1603, and must have been written after 1598, when one of its sources, George Chapman's Seven Books of the Iliads of Homer, was published: its armed Prologue is probably an allusion to Ben Jonson's Poetaster, acted in 1601, and since metrical tests place it after Hamlet and Twelfth Night but before Measure for Measure and Othello its likeliest date of composition is 1602.
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This ambiguous play has a thoroughly ambiguous textual history. Despite its 1603 entry in the Stationers' Register, the play appeared in quarto only in 1609, in an edition (set from Shakespeare's foul papers) which exists in two contradictory states: one promises on its title page that it prints Troilus and Cressida ‘As...[The entire page is 3096 words long]
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