Troilus and Cressida (and Troilus and Criseyde)

[Charles Darnay]

I've just finished reading Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and am looking to start on Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. I realize I probably should have reversed the order, but oh well. I'm wondering if anyone here has read Chaucer's work and would care to give your opinions - I am going to be working out the relation between the two texts.

I am still not sure what to make of Shakespeare's play. I went into it knowing basically nothing. I did not realize, for example, that it is meant to be a satire. Certainly, the way Shakespeare treats the famous Greek heroes is entirely different from the way Homer (read by Shakespeare via Chapman) presents them in the Iliad. There are no heroes in Shakespeare's play. Aeneas is the only major character who seems to have anything resembling honour - which is an interesting choice considering that Shakespeare was not bound to Rome in the way Vergil was.

Achilles has been reduced to a sniveling coward: even after Patroclus' death he is unable to kill Hector but gets his men to do the work and say he did it. The rest of the Greeks, as well as the Trojans are reduced to comedic characters torn between duty and civil honour. In one scene the Greeks and Trojans are laughing and drinking, in the next they kill each other. And through it all, Helen bears the full blame.

As for the relationship that is meant to be the centre of the play - it too seems to be a farce. Troilus is your typical rash young lover, and Cressida is like Desdemona if everything Iago said about her was actually true. The relationship has no resolution - nether ending in death nor reconciliation, leaving the audience with very little to ponder over.

I suppose I need to read Chaucer's text to see exactly what Shakespeare might be responding to, and why he creating this play which seems to destroy all conventions, both of the initial source (The Iliad) and of our notions of genre.

Does anyone have any thoughts on either text?

[Charles Darnay]

So I have now read this play a few times and tried to puzzle out some of its intricacies here: http://drowningmybooks.wordpress.com/

but the ultimate conclusion is that this is a difficult play - this coming from someone who considers himself well-versed in regards to Shakespeare.

[My2cents]

With the exception of Troilus, Cressida, Pandarus, and one other character, Thersites has the most lines in the play. He's not unlike Falstaff in 1Henry IV.

I did read somewhere that the play's complexity is only rivaled by Hamlet. I also vaguely recall reading that the play is in response to the Earl of Essex who defied the Queen and even got involved in a plot to remove her from the throne for which he was put under house arrest, making him the Achilles in the drama...or something along those lines

[Charles Darnay]

Yes I read that too.

[MorpheusSandman]

Like yourself, I read Shakespeare's play before Chaucer's. Ultimately, I think Chaucer's is a masterpiece while Shakespeare's is a flawed but fascinating work. Here's what I wrote on another forum regarding Chaucer's T&C when I was almost finished:


I was really skeptical that it could top Shakespeare's but I think it has, although their takes on it are completely different (Shakespeare was much more pitch-black cynical). Chaucer's Troilus is a real anomaly... I guess you'd call it a Verse Narrative Drama, but calling it a "chamber epic" might be more appropriate. It's 8000 lines, which is only 2000 short of Paradise Lost, and it is narrated rather than written in dialogue/monologues, but its division into 5 books, which follows the classic dramatic structure almost perfectly, as well as its tight focus on 3 central characters, puts it it squarely in the realm of classic drama. Whatever the case, it's a superb amalgamation. I can see what drew Shakespeare to it as Chaucer's main interest is on the psychology of his characters and the multitude of tangential themes (like free will VS predestination), as well as the ability to make comedy, tragedy, poetry exaggeration, sobering realism, lightness, heaviness, elegance, and clumsiness trip side-by-side.

The extended length allows Chaucer time and space to break everything down to the minutest details, really chronicling the entire psychological process of falling in lust, falling in love, falling out of love, and suffering heartache, and that extensively deep intimacy, rather than general broadness, is what makes it so extraordinary. I guess many would call it boring because there's very little superficial action. The entire first 2 books consists of nothing but Troilus falling for Criseyde and Pandarus running back-and-forth between them trying to convince Criseyde to give the guy a chance. They don't even really meet until Book 3, over 3000 lines into the proceedings. But what some would call boring I'd call patience and attention to detail. When they finally do get together the pages explode with some of the loveliest erotic/love poetry every penned. Chaucer knows how to build to a climax and then release it all at once. The breakdown of Books IV and V have been just as riveting, and Chaucer writes the way things fall apart and unravel with as much complexity as how they develop and come to fruition.

I guess it's a bit hard to compare T&C to The Canterbury Tales or Chaucer's Dream Poems because they're all so different, but, right now, I think T&C is my favorite work from him. TCT is a sprawlingly awesome achievement, but it's incomplete, fractured, and uneven, with its low points being as terrible as its high points are transcendent masterpieces. I think it's a bit difficult to really consider as a whole because it's so diverse. I will say that T&C is better than any single Tale. If I was forced to choose between them for a desert island trip it would be more difficult... I might take TCT just because of that awesome, if flawed, diversity. But T&C is Chaucer's "artistic perfection" masterpiece where everything is in its right place, shined to a magisterial greatness. The thing about Shakespeare's play is that one finishes it not knowing what to think about anything, about its characters, its themes, its tone... it is probably the most blatantly ambiguous of all his plays, and I think it even tops A&C and Coriolanus in that regard. I think the biggest thing one takes away from it is that Shakespeare didn't buy into the mythic nature of mythology at all, and by bringing a realism to that setting he really created a portrait radically different from the heroes of Homer. Everyone is cowardly, everyone is selfish, everyone is juvenile. There are no great battles, there's just people being killed while they aren't looking.

I actually think Chaucer's is not all that different in terms of its deconstruction of mythology, but as to where Shakespeare takes an outside-in perspective, where we are the gods watching these pathetic ants, in Chaucer we view things from an inside-out perspective where we're really taken through the psychological ringer with Troilus and Cressida both. But what Shakespeare views as cynical, Chaucer seems to view as heartbreaking. There is genuine pathos in Chaucer's version that's absent in Shakespeare's, and Chaucer also takes the time to muse on various philosophical topics that aren't broached in Shakespeare's.

I do ultimately view Chaucer's T&C as perhaps his finest, most perfect masterpiece, while Shakespeare's T&C is a rather mid-tier work in the Bard's incomparable canon. Both are certainly worth the reading and studying though.

[Charles Darnay]

Awesome stuff Morpheus, and I agree with pretty much all of it. I would not call Shakespeare's Troilus flawed - I think it does what it sets out to do - but certainly ambiguous. And having now read Chaucer's work, I agree with you that Chaucer's version is "better" as far as we can qualify these things. Shakespeare's version tends to strike out in too many directions, and while I love the second half of the play, the first half stumbles a bit, whereas Chaucer's version contains that intense focus. I also think that the sincerity of Chaucer's version fits better than the satire of Shakespeare's.

All that being said, there is the fact that Chaucer belongs on the page, and the poetry is what makes it great. I have never seen a version of Shakespeare's Troilus, but imagine that it is played with a lot more visual comedy than I imagined while reading it. IT is a dark comedy, emphasis on the comedy, but unlike Twelfth Night (written at the same time), Troilus' comedy is far more buried.

[MorpheusSandman]

Charles, you could check out the BBC production of T&C. I wouldn't call it a great adaptation, but it was quite interesting and is certainly played much for laughs. I do think they nailed the ambiguity of the texts, but there were certainly some questionable interpretative choices made. As far as Shakespeare's dark comedies/problem plays go, I think I slightly prefer Measure for Measure to T&C, though it's probably even more drama than comedy than T&C is. I've always been struck by the depths of that play that seem to surface briefly and then fade back into the drama and comedy of the play.