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  • Troilus and Cressida Reconsidered
  • R. A. Foakes (bio)
R. A. Foakes

Lecturer in English, University of Durham; author of The Romantic Assertion (1958), editor of the Arden edition of Shakespeare’s King Henry VIII (1957) and The Comedy of Errors (1902), and editor with R. T. Rickert of Henslowe’s Diary (1961)

notes

1. Alice Walker, in her Introduction to the New Cambridge edition (1957), xvi.

2. As by Harold Wilson, in his On the Design of Shakespearian Tragedy (1957), or by Brian Morris, “The Tragic Structure of Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Quarterly, X (1959), 481–92.

3. The conflict of views about the play can best be studied in the New Variorum edition, ed. H. N. Hillebrand and T. W. Baldwin (1953). The main attitudes have been noted above; the most important recent defenders of the play as comedy and tragedy have been Alice Walker and Harold Wilson, and the latter has behind him the authority of E. K. Chambers, in his “Shakespeare: An Epilogue,” RES, XVI (1940), 400. G. Wilson Knight’s reading of the play in The Wheel of Fire (1930) was also close to a tragic one. O. J. Campbell saw the play as satire ending in futility in his Shakespeare’s Comicall Satire (1943), and W. W. Lawrence, in Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies (1931), stressed the “philosophical” aspect of the play, finding in it “the searching analysis of a reflective criticism of life” (169), an approach which has been developed by Donald Stauffer and L. C. Knights.

4. In spite of its title, this is a play as much about the Trojan war, about Hector, Achilles, Ulysses, Ajax, and a host of others, as Julius Caesar is a play about Rome, and Brutus, Cassius, Antony, and a host of others.

5. See A. S. Knowland, “Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Quarterly, X (1959), 353–65.

6. The whole business is documented in T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (1950); see especially 39 ff. William Camden’s attack on the legend in Britannia (1586) led to the scholarly dismissal of it in the later seventeenth century, but the first edition of the Britannia in English did not appear until 1610.

7. Kendrick, 35–6.

8. For instance, the Admiral’s Men paid John Day and Henry Chettle for a play, or perhaps two plays, on the theme of Brutus in 1598; see Henslowe’s Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert (1961), 96, 98, 100, 102.

9. I think this is basically true of Ulysses; his big speeches have little effect on others, and the trick he plays on Achilles does not work; nevertheless, he has been regarded as the hero and the villain of the play. For a summary of critical opinions about him, see W. B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme (1954), 164–5.

10. It is a common view of the play that it shows us a disillusioned, cynical, or disgusted Shakespeare; see the New Variorum edition, 536, 538–9, 541, 543, for representative comments.

11. To alter the phrase “tragic farce,” coined, I think, by Eugene Ionesco to describe his play The Chairs.

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