Troilus and Cressida (review)

Perhaps because of its resolute ambiguity or sheer heterogeneity, Troilus and Cressida has lent itself to strikingly different stage productions. One of the pleasures of Anthony B. Dawson's fine new edition of the play is his lively introductory account of its one hundred years of theater productions. His account suggests that the richest responses to Troilus and Cressida have resulted from transformative encounters between Shakespeare's early modern text and later historical moments that illuminate different aspects of this complex play. Thus, during the Vietnam War, the play came to be seen as a ferocious assault on militarism and colonialism, though Dawson's introduction makes clear that in the 1960s and '70s the play could be framed in terms of a broad range of political registers. In Michael Langham's 1963 production, for example, the Trojan War revealed the face of American racial terrorism with the Myrmidons as the Ku Klux Klan. On the eve of World War II, by contrast, the message of the play seemed to be the danger of appeasement and political diffidence, as it was in Michael Macowan's 1938 modern-dress production that put the Trojans in British khaki and the Greeks in blue military uniforms reminiscent of German military dress. Among other innovations, Macowan's production apparently inaugurated the mini-tradition of turning the railing and satirical Thersites into a hard-bitten war correspondent, a move that goes a long way toward rendering this difficult character more comprehensible to modern audiences.

It is fascinating to read Dawson's account of how, during the 1980s and '90s, such political interpretations were gradually displaced by productions that made gender and sexuality the play's central concerns. This reorientation began with John Barton's 1968 production, which sought to evoke a web of homoerotic desire binding semi-nude actors together. Dawson offers a striking description of one of Barton's tactics; during the Trojan visit to the Greek camp, Helen's carriage opens to reveal not Helen but a semi-nude, recumbent Achilles with a blond wig beckoning erotically to Hector. This moment must have made the war look like a campy celebration of bodies rather than a realistic account of military violence; it is a reading of the play that informs much recent scholarship. One striking implication of Dawson's account of the productions of the 1980s and '90s is that a focus on homoerotic desire in the play often opens the door to a feminist concern with Cressida as a complex character who plays the weak hand she has been dealt as best she can. Dawson concludes his discussion of the play's theatrical reception by noting that "[a]ll performances interpret, they all do what they can with the multivalent opportunities that the script provides. That's why it is important to see and understand a wide variety of productions—they each can cast a beam on a different facet of the play" (64). In a sense, Dawson's lively account of a century of productions, together with the many stage photos reproduced in this edition, allow us to do just that.

The critical historicism that marks Dawson's account of Troilus and Cressida's theatrical reception is slightly less pronounced in his discussion of the play itself. Dawson describes the play as anticipating the aesthetics of high modernism; in fact, Dawson argues that the play could not be fully appreciated until the arrival of "twentieth-century readers and producers attuned to the uncertainties, ironies, and open-endedness of modernist novels or absurdist drama" (3). But while Dawson's account of the play as high modernism before the fact offers an interesting explanation of play's three-hundred-year absence from the English stage, it nevertheless blunts a more thoroughgoing historicist approach by licensing a turn toward pure aesthetic formalism. Dawson examines a number of the play's aesthetic and stylistic features including structural parallelisms, techniques of personification and de-personification, its recursive self-awareness...