Troilus and Cressida

Dramatic satire became popular in the early 1600s as a new, darker mood emerged in the London theatre. Shakespeare’s anti-romance, anti-epic tragedy-comedy-history-satire Troilus and Cressida is characterized by a mordant wit, a satirical depiction of war, and a dispiriting portrayal of sexual infidelity. Elliptical language abounds.

The play is often seen as being astonishingly modern, and it was largely disregarded for hundred of years, until the early twentieth century, since when it has come to be much admired, not least because it seems to raise the question of whether there can ever be such a thing as an absolute moral value. Moral values are repeatedly seen as relative, a very modern idea.

Shakespeare focused more on language to make his points later in his career, and this play has a lot of double negatives, retractions, qualifications, hypotheticals, and generalizations exploded by particular cases; and there is a serpentine construction to the arguments. Rhetoric was the staple of the grammar school, and the language of the Trojan and Greek councils would be familiar to those with education; and it would educate those without it.