Troilus and Cressida

Born into a middle-class English family in the middle of the 16th century, William Shakespeare received a grammar-school education in his youth. In 1582, at the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he went on to have three children: Susanna (born in 1583) and twins Hamnet and Judith (born in 1585). Following the birth of his children, Shakespeare evidently left Stratford. Little is known about the period between 1585 and 1592, by which time he was living in London and involved in the theatrical scene there. By 1592, he was writing for and performing with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men exclusively. Following the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603, the company changed its name to the King’s Men under a royal patent from King James I. During his prolific career, William Shakespeare authored at least 39 plays, four narrative poems, and a collection comprising 154 sonnets. His work made him both famous and wealthy. His theatrical company was able to build its own theater in the late 1590s, and he made extensive real estate investments in and around Stratford during the early years of the 17th century. According to his nearest-contemporary biographers, Shakespeare retired from the stage and returned to Stratford where he spent the final years of his life, although again, gaps in the historical record make it difficult if not impossible to assess these claims. He died at the age of 52 in April of 1616, survived by his wife and two daughters.

In the play, the Greek generals place much of the blame for the current state of the war—stalemate—on the refusal of their best warrior, Achilles, to participate. The play accordingly worries a lot about social hierarchy as well as documenting the detrimental effects of disobedience and disloyalty toward one’s superiors. In this way, it is not infrequently seen as responding in part to Essex’s Rebellion, a failed attempt by a disgraced Elizabethan lord to overthrow Queen Elizabeth I. Following a disastrous failure to put down a revolt against British colonial rule in Ireland, the formerly wealthy and powerful Robert Deveraux, 2nd Earl of Essex, found himself out of favor with the Queen. This had both political and financial implications. Facing personal ruin and having made friends with other people who disliked the current government, Essex initially hoped to stage a coup in early 1601. When these plans were foiled, he attempted to foment a general rebellion of the commoners in order to occupy key government locations in London. But his small following quickly abandoned him. He was captured, tried for treason, and executed in short order.

The general context of Troilus and Cressida—the Trojan War—first appears in The Iliad, the ancient Greek epic likely composed in the late 8th century BCE. Beginning in 1598, just a few years before Shakespeare penned his play, English playwright and translator George Chapman began to translate The Iliad, rendering it newly accessible to a wider English audience. But stories of Troy had long interested English audiences, and Elizabethan audiences may also have been familiar with the source material from John Lydgate’s Troy Book (written in the 1410s and 1420s), a retelling of the city’s history from its foundation to its fall, and from William Caxton’s 1464 Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, a similar collection and the first English book produced on a printing press. The doomed lovers Troilus and Cressida don’t appear in the Iliad but are the invention of medieval authors. Their story first appears in the 12th century, as part of Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s epic Roman de Troie. Giovanni Boccacio in turn drew from Roman de Troie in composing “Il Filostroto” (written around 1335), a courtly romance memorializing their unlucky love affair. Goeffrey Chaucer in turn drew from Boccacio for his lengthy treatment of the tale in Troilus and Criseyde, which was composed in the mid-1380s. Like the play, the medieval stories about Troilus and Cressida tend to end with the beginning of her relationship with Diomedes. But poem about the lovers, Robert Henryson’s 15th century Testament of Cresseid, focuses on what happens afterwards. Henryson imagines Diomedes ultimately abandoning Cressida and leaving her destitute. When she complains about Cupid’s role in her fate, the gods punish her with disfiguring leprosy, leading to a painful and solitary death. Troilus’s vitriol toward Cressida, which serves as the play’s implicit invitation for readers to judge Cressida harshly, may have been influenced by Henryson’s treatment.