Word: cressida
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...sheer tensile strength of a woman's will in Greek tragedy is unparalleled in any other literature. Of 33 extant plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, ten bear the names of women. Among the 39 Shakespearean titles, only three acknowledge women-Juliet, Cleopatra and Cressida-and all three share top billing with men. Sophocles' Antigone is a test of wills between a man and a woman, a king and his subject...
Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida," which officially opened the Loeb Drama Center on Saturday evening, is a long, ambiguous, dispirited play that professionals can hardly cope with. It is, I suspect, outside the range of amateurs. Although they can and do go through the motions of telling a story with considerable competence, they cannot endow it with a point of view. Nor can they become classical actors by working hard and willing...
...Shakespearean canon, "Troilus and Cressida" comes after "Hamlet" and the powerful tragedies and at a time of the moody, enigmatic comedies that are unresolved and express a general distaste for life. There was a time when pedants were convinced that Shakespeare had suffered a nervous breakdown. Romanticists are sure that the Dark Lady of the Sonners had betrayed him more wantonly than usual, and that, like Jimmy Durante, he was in a mowing mood...
...THEME remains. Cleopatra conducts us to it when she says of Caesar. "He words me girls, words me, that I should not/ Be noble to myself." The theme, which pulses in Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, Hamlet and western poetry, is that there is a conflict between words and poetry in which moral dignity and reason itself are consumed by degraded language. The nobility of man and woman must resist the corruption of mad discourse. The argument of values in Troilus and Cressida, a singularly distasteful but revelatory play, becomes a murderous melodrama of confused abstraction and disfigured moral orthodoxy...
...Trojan council scene of Troilus and Cressida, words are used without meanings, reason is damned, action perverted, human life demeaned to the value of food and coins. Priam, the Trojan king, sets the tone with the barbarically amoral lines...