Word: troilus
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Which is all fine and good, except Shakespeare wrote a supreme anti-climax. In the text (cut from this production) Troilus and his romantic replacement Diomedes fight one another across the stage three times, Shakespeare resorting to familiar mechanics prior to an important killing as he does in Macbeth and several of the history plays. But the killing never comes, they fight their way offstage, we never see them again, our expectations are brutally cheated. Instead, Hector (decidedly the wrong man at this point) gets killed with his pants down by Achilles, and the play ends with nothing resolved...
...averting the madness of war. Actually, it is merely a delaying action against ultimate defeat. For Giraudoux is bent on proving that there is a vile instinct in man that wills to kill. The play ends sadly and cynically with war breaking out and Helen kissing a new lover, Troilus...
...Troilus and Cressida, the grand opening production of the Loeb Drama Center, was universally acknowledged to be a bomb. Brooks Atkinson, who came up to review the play for the Crimson, said so unreservedly. Undergraduates said so in tones ranging from surface disappointment to unconcealed pleasure. Troilus's importance was more than ceremonial, however. It weakened the case for Loeb professionalism, since it was hardly a success. It also weakened the status of its director, Stephen Aaron, whose tenure as assistant director of the Loeb was to be extraordinarily brief...
...YORK SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL, New York City: Up in Central Park, Robert Burr plays the title role in Coriolanus with an able assist from James Earl Jones who also works out in Troilus and Cressida.* A mobile company, complete with dressing rooms, stage, and a 1,600-seat theater stowed into trucks, tours New York's five boroughs performing The Taming of the Shrew and Henry V in English and Romeo and Juliet en Espanol...
...that the crown that "in me was purchas'd, falls upon thee in a more fairer sort" (Shakespeare's way of saying that the king usurped the crown). In The Merry Wives of Windsor, the devil holds Sir John Falstaff in "fee-simple" (complete ownership). In Troilus and Cressida, even Greeks and Trojans talk in terms of "fee-form" (tenure without limit). "Lease" is used to express transience: life is a "lease of nature" (Macbeth); "summer's lease hath all too short a date" (Sonnet 18). As for "tenant," Hamlet's gravediggers argue that the most...