Word: troilus
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Next, let's not invoke Chaucer. His Troilus and Criseyde is the greatest long narrative poem in our language, and it is also the source of Shakespeare's lve story. But here too the dramatist radically altered the personalities of Chaucer's characters, and adopted an alien, discursive approach...
...state of Denmark. It has became global, and may well become universal. Knowledge is infinite; wisdom is finite. And for the first time in history, man's knowledge has now surpassed his wisdom to use it. The outlook is bleak; and never before has man so needed Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida...
...point is that Troilus can be validly set in almost any time and place. Ancient Troy is of course possible. But so is the Spain of the 1930's of Korea of the 1950's or Berlin of the 1960's. Of all Shakespeare's plays, it is actually the least dependent on a visual setting; and it loses least over the radio of phonograph...
...related, as such threads as there are end inconclusively. The work lacks the focal personage of two it badly needs. All these soldiers are gathered, but Priam is no Lee and Agamemnon is no Grant, not to mention an Alexander of a MacArthur. Nor is the work mainly about Troilus and Cressida any more than Julius Caesar is mainly about Caesar...
...Troilus is, in short, Shakespeare's most cerebral, most philosophical play. It takes its place right alongside the "disquisitory" plays of Shaw; in fact, if Shaw had been an Elizabethan, he would have written this work...