Troilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare

In the Folio of 1623, Troilus and Cressida is described as a tragedy; in the Quarto it is called a history; in most structural respects it seems to be a comedy, though a very grim and bitter one. Critics have frequently classified it, with Measure for Measure (pr. c. 1604, pb. 1623) and All’s Well That Ends Well (pr. c. 1602-1603, pb. 1623), as a “problem play,” perhaps as much because the play poses a problem in literary taxonomy as because it sets out to examine a problematic thesis. Probably written between Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (pr. c. 1600-1601, pb. 1603) and Othello, the Moor of Venice (pr. 1604, pb. 1622), during the period of the great tragedies, the play is so full of gloom and venom, so lacking in the playfulness and idealism of the earlier comedies, that critics have attributed its tone and manner either to a period of personal disillusionment in William Shakespeare’s life or to his preoccupation at that time with tragic themes.

There is no external and little internal evidence for the biographical conclusion. It may be, however, that, in Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare was affected by the surrounding tragedies. It is as if he took the moral ambiguities and potential chaos of the worlds of the tragedies and ruled out the possibility of redemption and transcendence through heroic suffering. He peoples this tenuous world with blowhards, cynics, and poltroons and ruthlessly lets them muddle through for themselves. The world of King Lear (pr. c. 1605-1606, pb. 1608), for example, is on the brink of chaos, but at least there is the sublimity of Lear to salvage it. The world of Troilus and Cressida has no one to shore up its structure and challenge disintegration.

Although there were many contemporary versions of the relevant Homeric materials available to Shakespeare, it is clear that he was also familiar with the story as told by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1382). Chaucer’s world, however, was full of innocence, brilliance, and hope. If the medieval Criseyde behaves shabbily, it is only the result of feminine weakness and long importuning. If Chaucer’s Troilus is naïve and a victim of courtly idealism, at least he can finally sort things out from an Olympian perspective. Shakespeare does not give his lovers, or the rest of the Greek heroes, this sympathy or opportunity but drags them through a drab and seamy degradation.

Shakespeare begins with characters traditionally honored for their nobility, but he does nothing to develop them even for a fall. He simply betrays them, to show them up, and thereby to represent the extreme precariousness of their world. The bloom of courtly love is gone as is the Christian optimism of the Middle Ages. Shakespeare seems to be reflecting not a personal situation but a late Renaissance malaise as he has his characters impotently preside at the dissolution of the revered old order.

In Chaucer, Troilus’s love and woe are instrumental in his maturation and, ultimately, in his salvation. Shakespeare’s Troilus is more frankly sensual and his liaison is correspondingly sordid. He does not benefit from an ennobling passion, nor is he allowed to transcend his folly. He is not even accorded the dignity of a significant death. He fights on in pointless, imperceptive frenzy.

Cressida is also debased. She falls from courtly heroine to common whore. Perhaps Shakespeare borrowed her degradation from Robert Henryson’s highly moralistic Testament of Cresseid (1532), in which the heroine sinks to prostitution. In any case, she does not have the initial austerity and later reserve that dignify the passion and fall of Chaucer’s Criseyde. Her language and her every movement suggest that she is more of a slut than a courtly heroine. Even as she enters the Greek camp, her promiscuous behavior betrays her, and her quick submission to Diomedes confirms what is suspected all along. As if the lovers cannot behave foully enough by themselves, Shakespeare provides them with Pandarus,...