Abstract
Greeks and Trojans have resurfaced in Shakespeare studies with special vigour during recent decades: Bloomsbury’s own volume Shakespeare and Greece (edited by Alison Findlay and Vassiliki Markidou) came out in 2017 and was preceded by numerous book chapters and comprehensive articles on early modern re-imaginings of Troy, by Tanya Pollard, Naomi Conn Liebler, and many others. In such an upsurge of scholarly interest, Troilus and Cressida: A Critical Reader is still able to fill a niche, with its careful choice and structuring of material pertaining to Shakespeare’s work. The volume offers more than a usual ‘collection of essays’: historical reviews merge with recent, cutting-edge original research and pedagogical issues.
After Efterpi Mitsi’s general introduction, which clearly outlines the play and the volume’s central concerns, the critical and performance histories of the play are summarised and re-assessed in three chapters, followed by four original essays under the heading ‘New Directions’; finally, the volume closes with a chapter on pedagogical tips. Consequently, the book is a rich treasure trove not only for the undergraduate student, providing basic information on Troilus and Cressida, but proves equally inspiring for instructors and scholars.
Another merit of the volume is that it showcases a multinational cast of English, Greek, Portuguese, and Hungarian Shakespeare scholars. Whereas the chapters attest to a wide horizon of interpretation techniques practised by and beyond Anglo-Saxon academia, the converging focal points also serve to shed light on the play’s central themes (decay, rival narratives, questioning the exemplary status of heroes, Greeks, and Trojans), often arriving at similar conclusions from different starting points.
Kinga Földváry’s review of ‘The Critical Backstory’ offers an almost 40-page-long, hefty but highly accessible account of how previous centuries reflected on the play, ranging from the 1600s to the 1970s. Her erudite and precise overview never becomes boring, nor so overwhelming as to alienate a less motivated reader. The occasional flashes of humour and the clarity of her style act as a guide through the intricacies of adaptation, publishing, editing, and scholarly approaches to the play, offering specific information on how John Dryden, Nicholas Rowe, Alexander Pope, Lewis Theobald and Samuel Johnson reacted to its controversial nature, but also sketching the bigger picture of 17th- and 18th-century editing of Shakespeare. Her account of the 19th century’s cautious and often morally distancing interest in the play’s ‘oddities’ introduces English, German and other continental authors and concerns with such clarity that even the non-expert reader can follow both specific comments on the play and the different waves of scholarly, philosophical or poetical reactions, from William Hazlitt and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Algernon Charles Swinburne, from August Wilhelm Schlegel to Heinrich Heine and Georg Brandes. The section on the 20th century discusses the emerging popularity of the play in academia; it serves as a valuable summary of critical history, while it also clarifies key terms still related to the genre of ‘problem plays’. Földváry aptly concludes that the ‘odd positioning’ of the text of Troilus and Cressida in the First Folio (missing from the Catalogue, placed between the histories and the tragedies) suggests the ‘liminality’ of the play in an almost prophetic way, resulting in unstable generic categorisation and wavering scholarly opinion throughout four centuries.
Francesca Rayner’s account of ‘The Performance History’ endeavours to crack an even harder nut: how to sum up theatre history meaningfully and select from so many performances in the 20th and 21st centuries, facing the everlasting (highly subjective) critical claim of missing out on a significant performance. Rayner evades the potential pitfalls of subjectivity, and maintains a strong focus, commenting on the ‘rival modes of performativity’ (56) – first analysing the play’s metatheatrical aspects and summarising the major points in Dryden’s Restoration adaptation, then moving on to performances from the 1910s to our days, since Troilus and Cressida started to enjoy unprecedented theatrical popularity only in the last century. To cut a path through so many performances, Rayner focuses our attention on leading motifs of different productions, grouping them according to the following themes: war, homosexuality and sexual liberation, Jan Kott’s influence, gender, and postmodern eclecticism. Finally, she comments on globalisation and adaptations in other media. Such a wide array and impressive amount of information might seem overwhelming; however, the several dozens of performances, ranging from the United States to England and Hungary, do paint an inspiring performative background history.
Johann Gregory’s chapter rounds off the first, historically directed part of the volume. He charts the variety of interpretative approaches regarding the play in the last four decades, examining ‘The State of the Art’, that is, cutting-edge achievements of Shakespeare studies, to bring up the story of the play to our day. He summarises and critically comments on resurfacing ideas, like the potential involvement of Shakespeare in the ‘Poetomachia’ with Troilus and Cressida, suggested by James Bednarz’s Shakespeare and the Poets’ War (2001) and clearly refuted by Gregory. He also discusses the recent new historicist interest in the play, emphasising political allusions to Essex and the cultural-ideological reception of ‘the matter of Troy’ in early modern England while also commenting on Heather James’s paradigm-setting monograph (Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire, 1997). Although one may be tempted occasionally to argue with his comments, the greatest asset of this chapter is that Gregory points out foci of scholarly interest in Troilus and Cressida, from attention to language and metatheatre to various and emerging critical trends (psychological, feminist, gender, presentist, ecocritical).
The ‘New Directions’ section of the volume offers four exploratory essays on the play. Interestingly, while the authors analyse the play from different viewpoints, certain echoes cannot be missed. Rob Maslen’s ‘The Decay of Exemplarity in Troilus and Cressida’ launches the discussion of decaying values, examining how the Humanist ideal of moral-historical exemplarity, according to which the story of Greek and Trojan warriors presents models to be followed, is connected to conflicted political allusions to Essex and, significantly, to the idea of history itself in early modern England. Citing numerous contemporary sources, Maslen claims that the play is not only ‘Shakespeare’s long farewell to English history’ (108), but it is also a comment on early modern views on history’s ‘truth value’ and potential ‘moral lesson’.
Miklós Péti’s thorough examination of ancient and early modern stereotypes of Greeks effectively questions the concept of ‘merry Greeks’ and ‘lovely Greece’. Although his review of scholarly standpoints on the subject is informative, it might have been cut down in size to help elaborate more on Péti’s own highly inspiring and original commentary on un-Homeric aspects and Shakespeare’s representation of Achilles. Vassiliki Markidou’s chapter focuses on the politics of ‘relics’, offering an instructive view on different meanings of this polysemous word in the play. Her analysis of the ‘relics of chivalry’, completed by references to iconoclastic ‘re-writings’ of the concept of holy relics and supplicants in terms of love and death, is a memorable and original take on the play. Finally, Paschalis Nikolau examines Greek translations of Troilus and Cressida, which, in theory, might prove less interesting to a non-Greek reader; however, his emphasis on the self-consciousness of translators and the effect of the recipient culture’s current issues on the text itself ring familiar to any reader. He proves how significant a role translators and their choices regarding language and register play in specific cultural contexts. Therefore, his account of different translations and adaptations by Vassilis Rotas, Errikos Bellies, Nikolaos M. Panagiotakis, and others effectively points out the culturally ‘palimpsestic’ nature of drama translations and their potential uses in the theatre. Finally, Richard Stacey writes about methodological considerations, introducing databases and their use in an undergraduate seminar, instructively putting theory into practice.
The volume is a good read: an inspiring mixture of informative and original scholarship on Troilus and Cressida, which should not be overlooked by any university library.