Word: troilus
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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...
...Troilus screams that the worth of Helen is infinite, which means indeterminate, capable of justifying the furthest thrill of insanity. He believes he is realistic when he calls for the preservation of "manhood and honor" by the vigorous prosecution of an irreversible war. That war is stark violence. Does this begin to sound compellingly relevant? As litility devours reason, the Renaissance heroic ideal of wise action becomes food for unheroic savagery. Troilus eats up reason in seeking honor as "the wide world's revenue." Hector dimly sees that appealing to infinite abstractions may insensibly transform public standards into an anarchy...
...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...
...throughout history. Shakespeare's original theme is that love can also serve to redeem the fallen soldier as it humanizes him. The power of Antony's death seene, as well as Cleopatra's, is provided by the knowledge that command depends on devotion as well as self-esteem. In Troilus and Cressida, a centrifugal labor on love and honor, the rejection of the mundane world seemed a base deception; in Antony and Cleopatra it seems like a nobler refuge. In East and West, Shakespeare scized on effective dramatic terms for the workings of love and war. Cleopatra replaces the gods...