37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 20: Troilus and Cressida

Troilus and Cressida, first broadcast November 7th, 1981

• Possibly written: 1602, possibly his 24th play
• What’s it about? During the Trojan War, Achilles sulks in his tent on the Greek side while Ajax prepares to fight Hector in his place. Meanwhile, over on the Trojan side, Prince Troilus loves a young woman named Cressida, but when her father defects to the Greeks, he insists that Cressida be forced to follow him. Troilus spies on her seemingly being untrue to him. There’s a battle, Achilles kills Hector while he’s unarmed, but the Troilus and Cressida story is forgotten and never concluded.
• Most famous dialogue: None, but we do take the phrase “good riddance” from this.
• Sources: Combines Homer’s Iliad with Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, and many others.
• Best insult: This play rivals Henry IV Part 1 for number of insults. There’s a character (Ajax’s slave Thersites) who does nothing but exchange insults. Some of the best:
• “Dog, thou bitch-wolf’s son”
• “Thou mongrel beef-witted lord”
• “Thou vinewedst leaven”
• “You whoreson cur”
• “Thou stool for a witch”
• “Thou has no more brain than I have in mine elbows”
• “Thou thing of no bowels, thou!”
• Best word: Orgulous? Frautage? Vinewedst? No, this is the best word we’ve encountered in all 20 plays: oppugnancy
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: This was my first exposure to the play
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: Charles Gray (Diamonds are Forever, Rocky Horror Picture Show) returns to the series (after playing Julius Caesar and others) as Pandarus, who gets Troilus and Cressida together in a leering way, thus giving us the word panderer. I don’t recognize anyone else.

How’s the cast? 

• Terrible. Anton Lesser as Troilus and Suzanne Burden as Cressida are both forgettable and I kept losing track of each one. Benjamin Whitrow as Ulysses is too old and not wily enough. Then there’s the issue of the three parts that are played as gay, which I’ll discuss below.

How’s the direction by Jonathan Miller?

• Terrible. Miller stages the play as if it was a comedy and the actors keep waiting for laughs that never come, because none of it is remotely funny. Yet again, he dresses them up in Elizabethan dress for no reason, which feels ridiculous in the Trojan War. This is the same director who just cast Anthony Hopkins as Othello in the previous production, but somehow this one is even more offensive as I’ll talk about below.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: How to Avoid Causing Offense

In the original Homer, Patroclus and Achilles seem, at least to modern readers, to be having a gay romance. Shakespeare also portrays them this way. Thersites says to Patroclus, “Thou art said to be Achilles’ male varlet.” Patroclus responds, “Male varlet, you rogue! What’s that?” and Thersites says, “Why, his masculine whore.”

So this is a play with gay content and that has to be dealt with. Miller, however makes odd choices. He has Simon Cutter play Patroclus as fairly effeminate, which is not inherently offensive, but has Kenneth Haigh seemingly play Achilles as straight, which loses out on a chance to positively portray a gay relationship. Oddly, Miller also has Charles Gray (who was good in his other productions) play Pandarus as a fey caricature of a gay man, though there’s no indication of that in the text, and it’s tremendously grating.

But Miller then codes a third character as gay, and here's where he really wrecks the production. For Thersites he cast an actor named Jack Birkett, who chose to be billed here as “The Incredible Orlando,” which is an odd billing to see in the BBC font. Wikipedia describes Birkett/Orlando as “flamboyantly gay.” As Thersites, he wears dresses, acts very swishy and speaks with a greatly exaggerated lisp. I was tremendously offended as I watched it, even more so than I had been by watching Anthony Hopkins play Othello, but I tempered my opinion of the character somewhat afterwards when I found out that Birkett/Orlando might not have been that far off from how he seemed in real life.

Is it inherently offensive to have three gay-coded characters in the time of the Trojan War? No, of course not. It’s somewhat progressive to not have “the single example.” Is it preferable to cast a flamboyant gay man in a part you have chosen to code as flamboyantly gay? Yes, it is. But something just tips into offense here, even knowing the circumstances.

Two years earlier, in 1979, the out-and-proud gay film director Derek Jarman cast Birkett/Orlando as Caliban in his version of “The Tempest” and I checked out his performance there to see how different it was. The performance was similar, and there was also a bit of a lisp there, but Birkett/Orlando was far less grating there that he is here. Jarman, being gay, seems to have a respect for Birkett/Orlando’s flamboyance that Miller, being straight, does not have. Thersites seems like a very cruel mockery of gay people, in a way that the same actor’s not-entirely dissimilar portrayal of Caliban did not.

Birkett/Orlando has a tremendous amount of fun with the part. He is simultaneously the best thing and the worst thing about this production. His insults and crudity are delightful, but the part is ruined by the fact that, though this was probably the farthest thing from the actor’s intention (and may not even have been the director’s intention), it feels like a hateful caricature.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: The Difference Between Ambiguity and Just Not Finishing the Damn Thing

What is this thing?

Embarking on this project, I was unfamiliar with several Shakespeare plays. I haven’t finished the project, so there are still six more coming up I am unfamiliar with, but, according to my research, this is the play that people are most confused about whether it is supposed to be a comedy or tragedy (or even a history play!)

Usually, you can tell from the ending. “The Winter’s Tale” and “Cymbeline” aren’t funny, but they end with scenes where everybody comes together to resolve mix-ups, lovers are reconciled, and everything works out for most characters, so we have to conclude that Shakespeare intended them to be comedies. This play has no such scene at the end. The entire final act is dark and heavy and nobody ends up happy, so it was surely intended to be a tragedy.

The problem is that the main story doesn’t end at all. The lovers pledge loyalty to each other but are separated, at which point she is dragged into what she considers to be an enemy camp, where she is immediately ordered by a general to kiss every man there. She then has an encounter with one where she may or may not be capable of consenting. Troilus spies on this and comes to hate her, and swears to kill the man she’s with. Indeed the next day in the war, he chases that man off stage, but we never find out if he killed him, and he returns back to his camp without ever confronting Cressida who is never seen or mentioned again! In the original Chaucer, Troilus dies in battle, but here he’s talking to Pandarus in the last scene, still quite alive. And Cressida? Who knows.

Surely the play is unfinished, but that would make more sense if it were published posthumously. Rather, this was one of the plays that Shakespeare published in his lifetime, so he seemingly okayed it being published in this form.

Bizarrely, when it was first sorted into a category, in the first Quarto, it was classified as a History Play! (Very odd since all of the plays that are classified today as History Plays took place in medieval England.) The First Folio then reclassified it as a Tragedy, but Miller seems to believe it’s a Comedy, and plays it as if it’s funny. Everybody seems vaguely amused by most events for no reason.

Ultimately, whether the story of the two lovers ended in death or reconciliation would have determined if it were tragedy or comedy, but since their story has no conclusion, we’ll never know. Given that it is possible that this was a complete play, should we assume that Shakespeare was being intentionally ambiguous here?

If so, this is the worst type of ambiguity. Even today, stories must climax. This non-climax is not intriguing or meaningful in any way, it’s just unsatisfying and bizarre. Maybe if either one had announced that they never wanted to see the other again, that might have given us some sort of finality, but no, we get the feeling that neither of them feels any closure here, and there would be ample opportunity to gain it if the story didn’t just end where it does. This might have been a chance to discover a third way other than reconciliation or death, and if Shakespeare had attempted something new, it could have been a great play, but the way it is, it just feels like it was unfinished or something went very wrong.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Consent is Tricky

One of Shakespeare’s favorite tropes is the woman who is falsely accused of infidelity. Women in Othello, Much Ado About Nothing and Cymbeline are framed for committing infidelity by a villainous third party, whereas in the Winter’s Tale, the husband just imagines the infidelity with nobody tricking him into it. In each case, it’s presented as the ultimate nightmare for these blameless women to face the most grave accusation a woman can face, one that makes the love of their life want to kill them.

I had begun to come to the conclusion that no Shakespearean women actually cheated, until I saw this play.* This play complicates that conclusion, but does not entirely overturn it. This situation is just really fucked up. Cressida is in love with a Trojan and loyal to Troy, but her father is not and bargains to have her seized in Troy and taken over to him in the Greek camp. Ulysses takes an immediate dislike to her, orders every Greek man to kiss her, then refuses to do so himself because he says she’s clearly a slut. She then has an assignation with one of the men that night, which Troilus spies on and condemns, but it’s hard for me to really see this as cheating. She’s in an enemy camp and cannot meaningfully give or refuse consent.

The question is, am I just misapplying messy 21st century morality to a situation that would have been clear at the time, or is Shakespeare intentionally allowing this messy interpretation? Ultimately, Cressida is an underwritten, unconvincing character either way. When everybody kisses her, she says some things to them that could be considered either flirtatious or just desperate to survive, and Shakespeare wrote the character well enough that an actress could play it either way, but Shakespeare doesn’t give her enough three-dimensionality to help us (or the poor actress) feel strongly either way. The play is just a mess, and has no ending, so we can choose how we feel, but god help the student who has to use this text to write a term paper defending his or her point of view. There’s a reason this play is never assigned.

(*Titania in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream is under a love spell, and is basically in an open marriage, so I don’t count her.)