Word: cressida
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...other play by Shakespeare has elicited such a wide spectrum of appraisals. It has become customary to group the work with the two that immediately preceded it--Troilus and Cressida and All's Well That Ends Well--as "dark" or "unpleasant" or "problem" comedies. The 19th century was generally repelled by Measure, Coleridge going so far as to brand it "the only painful part" of Shakespeare's output and applying to it such words as "odious," "disgusting," and "horrible." Twentieth-century minds have been much more intrigued by the play--some proclaiming it a masterpiece, which...
...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...
...Tyrone began his long affiliation with the Old Vic in 1933. Later he helped launch the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ont., and the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. He was an innovator who occasionally armed the bard's soldiers with machine guns and once staged Troilus and Cressida as an Edwardian piece, replacing Greeks with Prussians. Though he also directed Broadway hits, Sir Tyrone castigated the Great White Way as "a murderous, vulgar jungle...
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...