Abstract
More than any other play by Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida needs a ‘myriad-minded’ approach, one that sees the many problems of this problem comedy together, not separately. I begin with the cancelled title-page of the Quarto and the inserted ‘epistle to the reader’, oddities that we find in no other Shakespearian text, which will lead us directly to related problems — the play’s date, stage-history, textual transmission, genre, ending, and general interpretation.
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Reference
For the ‘private performance’ theory see Peter Alexander, ‘Troilus and Cressida, 1609’, The Library, IX (1929) 267ff.;
for the argument against it, Richard Levin, New Readings vs. Old Plays (1979) p. 167ff.
See ibid., II, 326; and W. Barlow, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse (1601) sig. D5b.
G. B. Harrison, Shakespeare’s Tragedies (1951) ch. 6.
See Chapman’s translations, Seaven Bookes of the Iliades (1598), Achilles Shield (1598);
Hugh Platt, The lewell House of Art and Nature (1594);
V. Saviolo, V. Saviolo his Practise (1595).
For Essex’s tallness see G. Petau-Maulette, Devoreux (1597) sig. E4b.
Cf. R. Pricket, Honors Fame (1604) sig. BP, B3b;
G. B. Harrison, A Last Elizabethan Journal 1599–1603 (1933) p. 156;
E. M. Tenison, Elizabethan England (Leamington Spa, privately printed, 12 vols, 1933–61) X, 112, and XI, 244–6;
P. M. Handover, The Second Cecil: the rise to power 1563–1604 (1959) pp. 29, 230.
Quoted in W. B. Devereux, Lives and Letters of the Devereux, Earls of Essex (2 vols, 1853) II, 95.
Cf. ibid., XI, 243–6; Alan G. R. Smith, Servant of the Cecils: the life of Sir Michael Hickes, 1543–1612 (1977) p. 122.
See W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio (Oxford, 1955) p. 347;
Alice Walker (ed.), Troilus and Cressida, New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1957) p. 206. Also Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio p. 165: ‘It occasionally happens that a line or part of a line occurs twice over some way apart in a scene, and that its first appearance is a patent error…. ’ Gary Taylor (cf. note 26) thinks that there is a ‘simple theatrical motive for adding the Folio’s half-line at the beginning of Ulysses’ speech: without it… spectators may not know who Ulysses is talking about’. I find this hard to believe, since (i) Troilus is the one Trojan with a reason to ‘look so heavy’, and (ii) his extreme youth has been stressed throughout (I.2.79, 110, 112, 226, etc.).
Gary Taylor, ‘Troilus and Cressida: bibliography, performance, and interpretation’, Shakespeare Studies, XV (1982) 99–136.
See S. Thomas in Shakespeare Quarterly, XXVII (1976) 186ff.
For the surviving copies of the Quarto see W. W. Greg, A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration (4 vols, 1939–57); and A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland& 1475–1640, 2nd edn, vol. 2, ed. Katharine F. Pantzer et al. (1976).
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© 1989 E. A. J. Honigmann
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Honigmann, E.A.J. (1989). Shakespeare suppressed: the unfortunate history of Troilus and Cressida. In: Myriad-minded Shakespeare. Contemporary Interpretations of Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19814-6_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19814-6_8
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