EN301: Shakespeare and Selected Dramatists
of his Time
The two 1609 Quarto title pages
The 1609 Epistle
 “Eternall reader, you have here a new
play, never stal’d with the Stage,
never clapper-clawed with the
palmes of the vulgar… refuse not, nor
like this the lesse, for not being
sullied, with the smoky breath of the
multitude…”
Troilus and Cressida,
Or, Truth Found Too Late

 Written by John Dryden for the
Duke’s Theatre, London, in 1679.
 Dryden’s third and final
Shakespeare adaptation
 Reduces cast
 Re-orders scenes (avoids “leaping
from Troy to the Grecian tents,
and thence back again in the same
Act”)
 Makes Cressida faithful to Troilus
 Follows an explicitly Aristotelian
model of tragedy, adding death
scenes for the title characters
Dryden’s Preface

 Dryden describes himself as having “undertaken to correct”
Shakespeare’s play, largely to bring it in line with neo-classical
tastes: “I undertook to remove that heap of rubbish, under
which many excellent thoughts lay wholly buried”.
 “Accordingly, I new-modelled the Plot; threw out many
unnecessary persons; improved those characters which were
begun, and left unfinished, as Hector, Troilus, Pandarus and
Thersites; and added that of Andromache.”
 Dryden objects that in Shakespeare, “Cressida is false, and is
not punished”; by contrast, Dryden’s Cressida is innocent.
“...the characters which should move our pity ought to have
virtuous inclinations, and degrees of moral goodness in them”.
Dryden’s legacy

 Dryden’s adaptation was revived numerous times in the early 18th
century between 1709 (at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane) and 1734
(at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden).
 There are no known productions of Troilus and Cressida on record
from 1734 until 1898 (when it was performed in Munich).
Whenever theatrical productions were contemplated during this
time, Dryden’s adaptation seems to have been the template:
 The actor-manager John Philip Kemble re-ordered Shakespeare’s text
into a scenic structure closer to Dryden’s when he started work on an
eventually unrealised production around 1800;
 A manuscript adaptation by ‘R. J.’ in 1810 combined Dryden and
Shakespeare.
 Numerous productions since have followed Dryden in adding
death scenes for Troilus and/or Cressida.
Cressida in Dryden
 Dryden’s version of 1.2 cuts a lot of Cressida’s interjections, quibbling and backchat
 Cressida’s soliloquy, which closes the act in Dryden, is rewritten to make her less
strategic and almost puzzled at her own actions:
 Shakespeare’s Cressida:

 Words, vows, gifts, tears, and love’s full

sacrifice
He offers in another’s enterprise;
But more in Troilus thousandfold I see
Than in the glass of Pandar’s praise may be.
Yet hold I off. Women are angels, wooing;
Things won are done. Joy’s soul lies in the
doing.
That she beloved knows nought that knows
not this:
Men prize the thing ungained more than it is.
That she was never yet that ever knew
Love got so sweet as when desire did sue.
Therefore this maxim out of love I teach:
Achievement is command; ungained,
beseech.
Then though my heart’s contents firm love
doth bear,
Nothing of that shall from mine eyes appear.
(1.2.260-72)
Dryden’s Cressida:
A strange dissembling sex we women are;
Well may we men, when we ourselves
deceive.
Long has my secret soul loved Troilus.
I drunk his praises from my Uncle’s mouth,
As if my ears could ne’er be satisfied;
Why then, why said I not I love this Prince?
How could my tongue conspire against my
heart,
To say I loved him not? O childish love!
’Tis like an infant froward in his play,
And what he most desires, he throws away.
Cressida in Dryden
 Shakespeare’s Cressida:
 Dryden’s Cressida:
TROILUS. O Cressida, how often have I wished
me thus.
CRESSIDA. Wished, my lord? The gods grant,--O,
my lord!
TROILUS. What should they grant? What makes
this pretty abruption? What too-curious dreg
espies my sweet lady in the fountain of our
love?
CRESSIDA. More dregs than water, if my fears
have eyes. […] Blind fear, that seeing reason

leads, finds safer footing than blind reason
stumbling without fear. To fear the worst oft
cures the worse. […] They say all lovers
swear more performance than they are able, 
and yet reserve an ability that they never
perform: vowing more than the perfection of
ten, and discharging less than the tenth part
of one. They that have the voice of lions and
the act of hares, are they not monsters?
(3.2.59-82)
TROILUS. O Cressida, how often have I
wished me here!
CRESSIDA. Wished, my lord? The gods
grant,--O my lord!
TROILUS. What should they grant? What
makes this pretty interruption in thy
words?
CRESSIDA. I speak I know not what!
The scene that follows is heavily edited
to remove all Cressida’ doubts about
Troilus.
Dryden adds in a bit where Cressida
repeatedly insists that she won’t go to
bed with Troilus without a promise
“that the holy Priest / Shall make us
one for ever”…
Dryden’s Cressida

 Between Shakespeare’s 5.1 and 5.2 Dryden adds a short but crucial
dialogue between Calchas and Cressida in which Calchas instructs his
daughter to “dissemble love to Diomede still” in order to put him off his
guard and better facilitate their escape back to Troy; he tells her specifically
that she must give up Troilus’ ring in order to be more convincing.
 At the climax, Troilus refuses to believe her account of this, and as she
protests she “but dissembled love” to Diomedes, Diomedes produces the
ring as evidence to the contrary. Troilus damns her to hell, and she,
heartbroken, stabs herself. “Oh, can you yet believe, that I am true?” she
asks as she dies; Troilus is convinced by her desperate action of her
“purest, whitest innocence”, though “too late I know it”. He curses himself,
but she blesses him with her dying breath, and her last line is “I die happy
that he thinks me true”.
“Correcting” Cressida

 R. J.’s 1810 manuscript adaptation mostly follows
Dryden, but departs from both sources at the end of
the lovers’ first scene together, when he adds a final
speech for Troilus affirming that Priam and Hecuba
have approved their marriage (there is no suggestion
in R. J.’s version that Troilus and Cressida actually
sleep together). He then adds a completely new
marriage scene between Troilus and Cressida set in
the Temple of Hymen at Troy.
“Correcting” Cressida

 Cutting Cressida’s lines in order to make her less complex seems to
have been common practice in early 20th-century productions. The
first professional American production in 1932, for example, cut
several of Cressida’s bawdy lines in 1.2, much of her soliloquy in
that scene (discussed above), and the entirety of her last soliloquy:
CRESSIDA. Troilus, farewell. One eye yet looks on thee,
But with my heart the other eye doth see.
Ah, poor our sex! This fault in us I find:
The error of our eye directs our mind.
What error leads must err. O then conclude:
Minds swayed by eyes are full of turpitude. (5.2.107-12)
“Correcting” Cressida

 Bridget Escolme gives a good sense of what may be lost with cuts
of this sort, speculating about “the meanings that might be
produced by a Cressida who makes eyes at us, who directly elicits
the audience’s approval for her actions or defies their disapproval
of them” (2005: 39).
 She notes that when, in a workshop, a student Cressida began
addressing the audience,
 “[t]he student spectators began to judge themselves rather than
Cressida’s morality, suddenly aware of their own role in the
production of meaning. They commented that they had been let into a
secret by Cressida and enjoyed the sense of power that this conferred.
The idea that Cressida, or the performer - and the fact that it was
unclear ‘who’ is significant - was flirting with them, was enjoyable
rather than reprehensible as it had been when the character had been
judged a flirt within a fictional locus.” (2005: 45)
Playing Cressida

 Dryden cuts the crucial scene in which Cressida arrives at the
Greek camp and is kissed by the commanders before being
condemned by Ulysses as “wanton”:
ULYSSES. Fie, fie upon her!
There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip;
Nay, her foot speaks. Her wanton spirits look out
At every joint and motive of her body.
O these encounterers so glib of tongue,
That give accosting welcome ere it comes,
And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts
To every ticklish reader, set them down
For sluttish spoils of opportunity
And daughters of the game. (4.6.55-64)
 To what extent does a production ask us to agree with Ulysses?
Playing Cressida

 For Robert Kimbrough, the speech is “almost a stage direction to
one playing Cressida’s role” (1964: 79).
 Indeed, many early 20th-century productions seem to have
endorsed this view if reviewers’ accounts can be trusted. Cressida
has been, for example:
 “mincing, detestable” and “repulsive” (The Times, 11 December 1912)
 “sighing, designing, crafty and fluffy” (The American, 7 June 1932)
 “a modern wanton” (Morning Legend, 28 April 1956)
 Director Tyrone Guthrie called the character “a minx… a witty,
flirtatious, highly sexed creature”:
 “She is also an opportunist, but in circumstances where opportunism
is understandable and forgivable.” (director’s notes, 1956)
This view of Cressida
was emblematised in
John Barton’s 1976
production of the play
for the RSC, when
Francesca Annis’s
Cressida was
“symbolically disrobed”
as she arrived at the
Greek camp and
“metamorphosed into a
Greek courtesan” (Rutter
2001: 129), the “assured
sexual specialist whom
Ulysses instantly
recognises” (The Times,
18 August 1976).
Playing Cressida

 For director Joseph Papp, however, Troilus was “the greatest
offender against decency” in the play and Cressida was “his
victim”: “I felt he applied a double standard in honour, and to me
this was immoral” (1967: 24).
 Papp saw the scene in which Cressida is kissed by the Greeks as
tantamount to a sexual assault and directed it as such for his 1965
production; indeed, many productions now play it in this manner.
 Papp makes a useful point about the timing of Cressida’s exit from
this scene:
 “In the case of Cressida leaving the stage with Diomedes, we hear
Ulysses’ speech about her while she is still in motion. It is interesting
to observe her walking off as Ulysses characterises her movement.”
(1967: 63)
Thersites

 Dryden tends to downplay the role of Thersites in his
adaptation (though he is given a very political epilogue).
 Dryden adds a scene in which Ulysses manipulates
Thersites into provoking an argument between Ajax and
Achilles; this means that later in the play, Thersites’
mockery of Ajax is more clearly part of Ulysses’ plan.
 Thersites is also more clearly wrong in Dryden, as he
interprets Cressida as a “strumpet” and a “whore”.
 Act Five Scene Two presents the battle not from Thersites’
perspective but from Agamemnon’s.
Thersites as war correspondent

 In Michael Macowan’s production (1938), Thersites was a
scruffy and cynical left-wing journalist, acting as a
commentator on the play (he delivered the prologue whilst
smoking a cigarette). This was a decision that Macowan felt was
“justified by Shakespeare’s having made him the mouthpiece
for his own bitterness and torment of spirit” (programme
notes).
 Dorothy L. Sayers wrote to The Times in response to their
review of this production:
 “…here is the great “war-debunking” play, whose savage
bitterness has never been equalled before or since. … If ever
there was a play for the times, it is this.” (24 September 1938)
Thersites as war correspondent

 In 1956, director Tyrone Guthrie set the play in the years leading
up to World War 1:
 “One of its important premises is that war is sport, a gallant and
delightful employment, indeed the only suitable employment for
young men of the Upper Class. This is a premise to which no one
nowadays can possibly subscribe. Therefore we have set the play back
to a date when such a view was still widely held but as near as
possible to our own times: namely just before 1914.” (Director’s notes)
 In this production, according to Ralph Berry, Thersites was “a war
correspondent, constantly setting up his box camera on a tripod.
This brings out the voyeurism, together with the radical discontent
of the man” (1981: 55).
 Alan Brien remembered the latter as “as a drunken war
correspondent scribbling gossip —'they say he keeps a Trojan
drab'…” (Spectator, 28 July 1960).
Female Thersites

 William Poel’s 1913 production had a female Thersites in
a jester’s costume.
 In 2012, the Maori production that visited Shakespeare’s
Globe for the Globe to Globe festival likewise had a
female actor, Juanita Hepi, as Tēhiti (Thersites):
 “Hepi’s Tēhiti carried the same taiaha as the men, but
treated it with satirical disdain; as a woman, she was able to
mimic and pastiche the other characters’ masculine
behaviour without relinquishing her own gender identity.
Her parody of Āhaka’s (Ajax’s) ultra-macho posturing was
acutely observed.” (Purcell 2013: 211)
Female Thersites

 The American Shakespeare Center’s 2013
production likewise had a female Thersites.
 Allison Glenzer’ s Thersites was alone in an
otherwise historically-costumed production
in wearing anachronistic shoes (black
converse-style sneakers), and got frequent
rounds of applause from the audience for her
comic turns (for example, her mockery of
Ajax).
 But there were serious resonances too:
Thersites’ frequent use of the word “whore”
sounded more ironic from the mouth of a
female performer, and Glenzer’s doubling as
Cassandra provoked an unexpected parallel
(both characters are reviled or ignored truthtellers).
Masculinity

 Honour is more gendered in Dryden’s 2.1 (Shakespeare’s 2.2):
 Shakespeare’s “theft most base” (91) becomes “unmanly theft”;
Paris’s “sweet delights” (142) become “effeminate joys”. Compare:
 Shakespeare’s Troilus:

 Why, there you touched the life of our 
design.
Were it not glory that we more affected
Than the performance of our heaving
spleens,
I would not wish a drop of Trojan
blood
Spent more in her defence. (2.2.193-7)
Dryden’s Troilus:
Why there you touched the life of our
design:
Were it not glory that we covet more
Than war and vengeance ( beasts’ and
women’s pleasure)
I would not wish a drop of Trojan
blood
Spent more in her defence.
Masculinity

 Dryden adds some new passages to hammer the point home:
 Andromache says “I would be worthy to be Hectors wife: /
And had I been a Man, as my Soul’s one / I had aspir’d a
nobler name, his friend”; Hector replies, “Come to my Arms,
thou manlier Virtue come; / Thou better Name than wife!”.
 When Priam admits he is fearful, Andromache admonishes
him with “There spoke a woman, pardon Royal Sir”.
 At the end, Troilus laments for Cressida “like a woman” and is
about to kill himself when manliness takes over again and he
fights Diomedes to the death, only to be killed himself by
Achilles.
Masculinity

 Does this reveal an anxiety about Shakespeare’s own
presentation of masculinity?
 For Joseph Papp, the play “demonstrates that the
superior posture of the male and his distorted
attitudes towards women and war lead to folly and
his ultimate destruction” (programme notes, 1965).
 As Carol Rutter has put it:
 “Male politics in Troilus and Cressida needs the woman,
needs her, mystified, to legitimate its practices; needs
her, objectified, to serve its objectives.” (2001: 122)
Masculinity

 Achilles and Patroclus especially blur the boundaries of
heteronormative constructions of masculinity:
 Patroclus notes that he is “condemned” as “an effeminate
man / In time of action”, urging Achilles, “Sweet, rouse
yourself” (3.3.211-15).
 Achilles admits to “a woman’s longing, / An appetite that I
am sick withal, / To see great Hector in his weeds of peace,
/ To talk with him and to behold his visage / Even to my
full of view” (3.3.230-4).
 Thersites calls Patroclus “Achilles’ male varlet… his
masculine whore” (5.1.14-16).
Masculinity

 John Barton’s 1968 production featured an Achilles in drag: Alan
Howard donned a blonde wig and a dress in an impersonation of
Helen in order to meet Hector during the truce, and then to tease
Menelaus as the party began.
 Barton said he saw Achilles “as bisexual, a view which is surely
embodied in Shakespeare’s play and is also the view which the
Elizabethan audience would have taken” (Lloyd Evans 1972: 70).
 It is significant that Barton’s production was staged in 1968, one
year after the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the UK and
just before the end of stage censorship.
 Simon Shepherd has criticised the production as “an essentially
heterosexist association of drag with unhealthy self-indulgence”
(1988: 108).
Drag

 For his 1981 TV production, Jonathan Miller cast drag
performer The Incredible Orlando (Jack Birkett) as Thersites.
 David Suchet’s Achilles cross-dressed at one point in Terry
Hands’ 1981 RSC production.
 Pandarus was a drag queen in Ian Judge’s 1996 RSC
production.
 In Cheek by Jowl’s 2008 production, Thersites first appeared in
drag as a cleaning lady (making sense of Ajax’s “Mistress
Thersites”) before returning to entertain the troops as a
something like a Marlene Dietrich tribute act.
 Achilles, Patroclus and Thersites all wore drag in the 2012
RSC/Wooster Group co-production.
Order

 Dryden opens his Act One with Shakespeare’s 1.3, and Act Two
with Shakespeare’s 2.2, meaning that Agamemnon and Priam are
the first speakers of each act respectively.
 His first scene concludes with a speech in which Agamemnon
gives explicit instruction to Ulysses and Nestor to “put a stop to
these encroaching ills” and “vindicate the dignity of Kings” (thus
removing some of that plot’s subversive potential).
 Similarly, the play is refashioned into a parable of dutiful
obedience to authority in its closing speech:
ULYSSES. Now peaceful order has resumed the reins;
Old time looks young, and nature seems renewed.
Then since from homebred factions ruin springs,
Let subjects learn obedience to their Kings.
 Indeed, for Shakespeare’s Ulysses, the root of the Greeks’ problems
is that “The specialty of rule hath been neglected”:
ULYSSES. The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre
Observe degree, priority and place,
Infixture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office and custom, in all line of order.
[…] But when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents, what mutiny?
What raging of the sea, shaking of earth?
Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixure. O when degree is shaked,
Which is the ladder to all high designs,
Then enterprise is sick. […]
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows. […]
The general’s disdained
By him one step below; he, by the next;
That next, by him beneath. […]
And ’tis this fever that keeps Troy on foot,
Not her own sinews. (1.3.85-136)
 E.M.W. Tillyard saw Ulysses’ speech as indicative of an “Elizabethan
World Picture” shared by the whole society, a conception of order that was
“so taken for granted, so much part of the collective mind of the people,
that it is hardly mentioned except in explicitly didactic passages” (1963:
18).
 Then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson on this speech in 1983:
 “The fact of differences, and the need for some kind of hierarchy, both these
facts, are expressed more powerfully there than anywhere else I know in
literature. … Shakespeare was a Tory, without any doubt.” (Guardian, 5
September 1983)
 In 1994, Michael Portillo (then Chief Secretary to the Treasury) used the
speech to illustrate how “order in society depends upon a series of
relationships of respect and duty from top to bottom”, and to condemn a
“New British Disease: the self-destructive sickness of national cynicism”:
 “If Crown, Parliament and Church are not respected, neither will be law,
judges or policemen, nor professors nor teachers nor social workers, nor bosses,
managers or foremen. Social disorder follows when respect breaks down.”
(Independent, 16 January 1994)
 The Ulysses speech is also cited in The Faber Book of Conservatism (ed. Keith
Baker, 1993, pp. 19-20).
Order

 But as Margo Heinemann points out, “Ulysses may talk about
the sacredness of hierarchy and order, but the setting shows
him as a cunning politician whose behaviour undercuts what
he says here, as indeed does the whole play” (1994: 227).
 Indeed, we might think forward to Ulysses’ own deliberate
flouting of “degree”:
ULYSSES. Let us like merchants show our foulest wares
And think, perchance, they’ll sell. […]
No, make a lott’ry,
And by device let blockish Ajax draw
The sort to fight with Hector. Among ourselves
Give him allowance as the worthier man. (1.3.352-70)
Order

 In Mark Wing-Davey’s 1995 production, 1.3 started with
soldiers watching a TV news report about the Bosnian war
(“near Sarajevo, the UN rapid reaction force is increasing the
deployment…”)
 Ulysses switched the TV back on for “But when the planets…”,
flicking through channels to illustrate the “raging of the sea,
shaking of earth[,] /Commotion in the winds, frights, changes,
horrors…” (1.3.94-8).
 He gestured to himself, interestingly, on “him one step below”
(1.3.130); later, he fully and obscenely mimed all of Patroclus’
“scurrile jests” (1.3.148), paradoxically doing the very thing he
was supposedly condemning.
Order

 By 2012, Portillo (now really a broadcaster rather
than a politician) had rather different things to say
about the play…
 My Own Shakespeare, Michael Portillo, BBC Radio 4,
21 May 2012
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02r58gb)
References

 Berry, Ralph (1981) Changing Styles in Shakespeare, London,
George Allen & Unwin.
 Escolme, Bridget (2005) Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare,
performance, self, London and New York: Routledge.
 Heinemann, Margo (1994) ‘How Brecht read Shakespeare’, in
Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield [eds] Political Shakespeare:
Essays in Cultural Materialism, 2nd edition, Manchester: M. U. P.
 Kimbrough, Robert (1964) Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and
its Setting, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
 Lloyd Evans, Gareth (1972) ‘Directing Problem Plays’,
Shakespeare Survey 25, 63-72.
References

 Papp, Joseph (1967) ‘Directing Troilus and Cressida’ in Bernard Beckerman
and Joseph Papp [eds] The Festival Shakespeare: Troilus and Cressida, New
York: Macmillan, 23-72.
 Purcell, Stephen (2013) ‘Troilus and Cressida’ in Paul Prescott and Erin
Sullivan [eds] A Year of Shakespeare, London: Bloomsbury Arden
Shakespeare, 210-12.
 Rutter, Carol Chillington (2001) Enter the Body: Women and Representation on
Shakespeare’s Stage, London: Routledge.
 Shepherd, Simon (1988) ‘Shakespeare’s Private Drawer: Shakespeare and
Homosexuality’ in Graham Holderness [ed.] The Shakespeare Myth,
Manchester: M. U. P., 96-110.
 Tillyard, E. M. W. (1963) The Elizabethan World Picture, Harmondsworth:
Penguin.