ABSTRACT
No play testifies more powerfully than Troilus and Cressida to the need for an approach to Shakespeare frankly anchored in the present. Shakespeare’s ‘mysterious and magnificent monster of a play’ (Swinburne 1880: 199) begs to be read as a scathing parable of our modern plight, tricked out as an ancient tale of blighted love in Homer’s Troy and couched in the alien idiom of the Elizabethan stage. The play was never at home in its own time, which plainly had no idea what to make of it. The title-page of the revised 1609 Quarto dubbed it ‘The Famous Historie of Troylus and Cresseid’, while the anonymous blurb in the same edition, cryptically addressed by ‘a never writer to an ever reader’, hawked it as ‘passing full of the palm comical’ and stiff competition for Terence and Plautus (Shakespeare 1998b: 120-21).1 In the First Folio, however, the play is entitled ‘The Tragedie of Troylus and Cressida’, although the title does not appear in the ‘Catalogue’, or table of contents, and the text lies stranded between the histories and the tragedies, marooned in the generic twilight zone it has haunted ever since. To make matters murkier, the title page of the first 1609 Quarto bills it as acted at the Globe by Shakespeare’s company, ‘the Kings Maiesties servants’, a claim contradicted in the second edition by the ‘never writer’, who assures the ‘eternal reader’: ‘you have here a new play, never staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar’ (Shakespeare 1998b: 120). Nor is there any record
of private performance at the Inns of Court, at Whitehall or anywhere else, which would mean – if the ‘never writer’ is to be trusted – that Troilus was ‘never staled with the stage’ for three hundred years, and that Charles Fry’s production at the Great Queen Street Theatre in 1907 was its British premiere.
