An Essay on Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida : In Terms of the Love Story

Abstract

One of the distinguishing features of Shakespeare is his ability to create plays out of different kinds of source-materials and to define an entirely independent atmosphere in each play. Troilus and Cressida is a good example of the dramatist's ability to create and define. In this paper have we seen how Shakespeare put together in a brief and concise way materials of an old story, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde in particular, and that the dramatist deliberately interwove them, laying stress upon other parts of the narrative poem. It turns out that Shakespeare was experimenting with deformed denouement on the assumption that a particular audience had read Chaucer's Troilus. Shakespeare needed to devise a new type of tragedy which was indispensable before Hamlet could be written. Troilus and Cressida appears to have been an integral work to the corpus of Shakespeare ; not a wholly successful one, but one which must establish the bond between greater tragedies of that period.