Shakespeare Lecture Notes 2/12

I’m back from being sick last week! Joe is also sick.

Troilus and Cressida

- One of Shakespeare’s most difficult plays
- Very taxing language - anticipates the language in later romances (Winter’s Tale)
- Postulated that this was not written for public, for a private court
- Very literate play
- Was Joe’s favorite play - grew up with classics and facing Vietnam war
- Can work as long as you aren’t afraid of it
- Done in 2nd or 3rd season of the globe
- Difficult to pinpoint Burbage
- Shakespeare made his actors happy - no small feat in a repertory theater
Descriptions different in each printing
- First published in 1609 as The History of Troilus and Cressida
- Acted by the King’s Men
- Corto 1A and Corto 1B call the play a comedy and say it hasn’t been acted
- Then called a tragedy
- We haven’t seen a history comedy before, but a tragicomedy is cheating
Tragedy
- Questions if any individual death can have any meaning
Comedy
- Has to do with society and how ideas can be perpetuated despite personal lives
- Life goes on despite mishaps
- Often ends with a marriage or four
How does Troilus and Cressida end?
- Death and separation and no marriage
- Ends with the words of Ponderous
- A comic character
- Why do pretty girl and pretty boy get married? Have pretty babies. Give each other and
their future children diseases.
- In this play, even when you’re laughing you’re laughing bitterly
- A little blinded as we don’t know where Burbage was in this
Hector
- Great hero, but killed off and discredited (justly or not)
- Very modern (Catch-22), works for a book, but this confusion is hard for a play
- An audience that doesn’t know whether to laugh or sneer quickly becomes impatient
- Cherry Orchard and Ibsen are/have comedies with extremely dreary writing
Wrote it for a more educated audience
- Because of its subject: two overlapping literary traditions
- Direct reference to Geoffrey Chaucer's famous poem: Troilus and Crusade
 - Giant, extraordinary narrative poem about the Trojan War and seeing it through
the lens of medieval romance
- Trojan woman named Cressida who Troilus adores, aspires to, and dedicates himself to
- Courtly, medieval figures that function in a very Christian allegory about the movement of
the soul towards heaven
Cressida (in the poem, not the play)
- Subject of the idolatry of this affection
- Good for her to marry this guy, but can’t be done because he’s a prince
- She has to play her cards right and be careful
- Other awareness of her position: she loves Troilus
- How could she be worthy of the kind of love he’s offering her?
- She begins to question her own worthiness as a human being
- One of the rare cases where a woman in a medieval poem questions why she exists
- Questions herself as a daughter of Eve
- Chaucer’s Troilus is not just a naive young man, he believes you have to go down the
right path and love in the right way
- Chose Cressida half because of her lower class and half for him to be better
- Lightly sketched in, one way __her uncle(?)__ wants to be of service to Troilus is to help
him win Cressida
- Cressida moves in to square self-loathing and believes herself to be the worst image of
woman - as men see women
- Troilus is killed in battle: his soul rises above the battlefield and looks down
- “Somnium Scipionis”: The Dream of Scipio
- Cicero
- Describes how a great general looks down on the world and watches the
world get smaller and smaller and how little human endeavor is
- Greatest man is only destined to live for a short time
- Stoic philosophy where you moderate the extremes between rationality
and passions
- Could have been anything and it would have made little difference
- Seeing the universe at a great speed and sees the music that the great
spheres make that is beyond the hearing of any human being
- With this, humans should be more modest about their actions
- Huge influence on future works!
- Knowledge of things that one cannot know within one lifetime
One hell of a poem, but would Shakespeare have known it?
- Copies would not have been very readily available during Shakespeare’s lifetime
- One of his best buddies was a printer who came down from Stratford to London
- Shakespeare would read whatever came through plus people knew and told the
story without having necessarily available
- Popularly available, and even more available in an educated audience
- May have been flaunting his knowledge
Troilus and Crusade
 - Made a bunch of sequels from others
- In one, much of it is spoken by Crusade
- Long after the war, and she is a prostitute
- She’s developed leprosy and is trying to hide it, body parts falling off
- Idea that to be false is to be rotten (and women are rotten)
- Shakespeare would inherit that idea
- First printed book in English 1494
- Stories about and in Troy
- 7 books of the Iliad and Homer also published
- Troy was on everyone’s lips
Shakespeare was never a business idiot
- He knew that people, especially educated people, were interested
The Iliad
- The second HUGE influence
- Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida is a deconstruction of the Iliad
- The Bard that sang the Iliad had great respect
- All that we know about Greek Mythology now is inherited by the Greek world and gives
rise to Greek literature, philosophy, and architecture
- Greek tragedy comes from the characters in the Iliad
- This is the one thing how Western culture knows itself
- Throw in some books from the bible and you’ve got ​us
Look at ​worth
- Go from objective to subjective
- Money? You’re pretty worthless
- You believe you’re worth a lot more
- Hardly uses an abstraction or a metaphor, it is very concrete
- Represented by divinities, by the gods
- What the Iliad is is a discovery of what these can do to a human being?
- Challenges human strength at its utmost
- Iliad assumes that war is the greatest test of mankind
- Interesting that greatest work in our culture is dedicated to the glory and
ambiguity of war
Characters in the Iliad
- Agamemnon
- Greatest of kings who’s supplied everything
- Representative of Zeus
- Does he deserve it or is he just rich?
- What is there about wealth that seems to draw value to itself
- Achilles
- Greatest and strongest of the Greeks because his mom is a God
- He has the ear of Zues and that gives him an advantage
- If he’s the greatest warrior, why is he the king?
- Hector
 - Dirty job that scares his family
- Ambiguity

Prologue
- Someone enters in armor
- Huge, heightened language
- “Ravish” rape
- Different meanings now than then
- If Troilus is just an ass and Cressida is just a whore, what are we fighting about?
- Planting words that tip the balance from the word go
Line 20
- “...skittish spirits”
- Very different than the Henry V’s prologue
- That one appealed to the audience
- This one says hey this is what we’re gonna do
- The soldier says he’s a soldier and says not to trust actors or playwrights because
they’re full of shit
- Marvelous act of metatheatre
- Likely that he immediately became Troilus and took off his armor
- Are you worth more where you can fight?
Pay attention to the two lovers as the title
- This is significant
- Are they like Romeo and Juliet, where their deaths are stupid?
- That’s tragic because of the circumstances
- Also an essay on social expectations
- Are you who you are because of your position among others?
- What does that position entail?
- What is the relation of your inner life to your outer circumstances?

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