Where is Troilus and Cressida?

“…one can never say, in an absolute sense, what Hamlet is, or where one can find it: there is no thing that will always, forever, be Hamlet" (Margaret Jane Kidnie, 'Where is Hamlet?'). Where is Troilus and Cressida? Discuss with reference to “The Great Fortune”, “Troilus and Criseyde”, and “Truth Found Too Late".

 “Troilus and Cressida” is one of Shakespeare’s later plays, written shortly after “Hamlet”, and has posed problems to both critics and potential adaptors ever since its creation. Performance records prior to the 1900s are few and far between. In an early edition it is stated that the play was "never staled with the Stage, never clapper-clawd with the palmes of the vulgar" – although this could very well mean that the only productions were private ones, open solely to members of high society. Some believe this is because the characters are thinly disguised caricatures of Shakespeare’s contemporaries; others assign its mixed public reception to the play’s ambiguous tone, unresolved romantic conflict, and biting cynicism. It defies classification: tragic in structure, comedic in execution, and historical in setting, it is positioned in-between the last of the histories and the first of the tragedies, further muddying the question of its genre. It has been hypothesised that the play began as a comedy, and that the darker material was inserted in a later revision, resulting in a hybrid of tones and genres, but in the 1623 Folio it is clearly described as a tragedy (directly contradicting the Quartos, in which it is classed as a history play). If we are to read Troilus and Cressida as tragic protagonists, we may have to redefine our idea of tragedy altogether, and yet they do not seem to fit the model of comedic protagonists either. Additionally, the epistle to the reader describes “Troilus and Cressida” as containing much of "the savoured salt of wit" – a claim that seems at odds with both of these categorisations. These discrepancies have resulted in “Troilus and Cressida” being classed, along with “Measure for Measure” and “All’s Well that Ends Well”, as a problem play.
Because the text itself is fundamentally undecided about what it should be, the reader is presented with a certain amount of difficulty in determining where, exactly, one should place it. Purists might argue, not entirely unreasonably, that the true “Troilus and Cressida” is found in the source text. In the beginning, after all, was the Word; and so it is that everything begins with the writer, without whom there would be no performance, no adaptation – no text. If this is indeed the case, then each version of “Troilus and Cressida” that has emerged over the past four hundred years must therefore be judged in accordance with its fidelity, or rather the level to which it aspires to emulate Shakespeare's original in language, execution, and intention. If we see performance as an adaptation of a textual medium to a stage medium, then it follows that the textual source is the precursor, the “authentic” play. The performance’s quality can thus be critiqued in accordance with how closely the two resemble one another. The primary justification for this standing seems to be that performance cannot exist without there first being a text, whereas the text is capable of standing alone. Students of this particular school of thought often oppose themselves to the idea of proximation – of bringing plays like “Troilus and Cressida” closer to a modern audience’s frame of reference, whether by modernising the setting or by creating deliberate parallels with present-day situations. Although adaptations such as these still tend to retain a dialogical relationship with the “source” text, a minority of traditionalists still hold that innovation for the sake of innovation serves only to efface our cultural history, transforming Shakespeare’s language and unique viewpoints into a free-for-all in which any passage can be entirely re-contextualised and divorced from its original meaning. In an article on epigram.org.uk, Miriam Partington comments that “the modern adaptation, in its pursuit to make Shakespeare’s plays more accessible and universal, creates simplified versions that lose the essence and complexity of their original texts” – although she does acknowledge passingly that modernisation serves as a reliable method for keeping Shakespeare’s work alive in the modern era, fending off potential irrelevance or stagnation.
However, assigning this level of value to the source text is problematised by the fact that we cannot say for certain which text is the source, the origin to which all subsequent reprisals can be traced. Is it simply the oldest version of the text which demands our respect? If so, then Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida" is merely an adaptation of Chaucer's 1380s poem "Troilus and Criseyde”, which is itself derived from “Il Filostrato” by Boccaccio. Even this, though, is not the beginning of the canonical timeline. If we take it upon ourselves to trace it back further, we seem to arrive at the true source – namely a narrative poem by Benoît de Sainte-Maure, titled “Roman de Troie”. Is this, then, the authentic text? Hardly so, for the characters themselves clearly date back to Greek mythology – although Cressida is a markedly later creation, and her origins in the mythic canon are hazy at best. She is present in the Iliad under the name Chryseis, but inexplicably has no involvement (romantic or otherwise) with either Troilus or Diomedes. Her first recorded connection with either of them is narrated in “Roman de Troie”, but even here her name is not Cressida but Briseida, a name cognate with that of the Greek princess Briseis. The confusion between these two characters prevents us from identifying a clear mythological figure whom we may recognise as “Cressida”, and renders the hunt for a true textual source all the more complex. The love story, certainly, is not part of the original myth, but rather a bricolage of divergent characters and narratives, converging upon one another, growing more concrete as their canon is upheld by different authors throughout the ages.
When attempting to place a text like “Troilus and Cressida”, it becomes essential to demystify the idea of the author. Authorship is a fluid concept, and we can witness the demystifying process happening on the stage as various actors (or interventions in acting) happen along and change things. Early modern playwriting is an act of collaboration that belongs first to the playhouse, and Shakespeare the playwright is first Shakespeare the actor writing for a company of actors. Furthermore, plays in Shakespeare's time – and to a certain extent, plays in our own time – were ephemeral. Publication was unusual, not unlike publishing a radio script; it was simply not seen as something that people would wish to read independently of the stage. One should also be mindful that dramatic literature and scripts are two entirely separate entities. Scripts, for example, are constantly edited and reworked in order to fit certain parameters, whereas dramatic literature remains static. It is also politic to mention here that even if we refer to Shakespeare's text alone, disregarding all other texts that have gone before it, the theatrical document itself – the physical writing, published and transmitted to us in multiple editions, commonly known as the playbook – is not a singular entity. The actors would have received something entirely different: a text, certainly, but a performance text rather than a playbook, stripped bare and reduced only to the lines which they themselves had to speak (and the cues upon which they had to speak them). In some cases, as with King Lear, there are multiple editions of the playbook itself, referred to as the Quarto and the Folio. Considering the age of the text in conjunction with potential errors of transcription, translation, and alteration across the years, it becomes nigh impossible to say which elements of the text came directly from Shakespeare, and which have been bastardised. However, it can be argued that there is a third type of text, one which moves beyond the serviceable austerity of the performance text and yet remains discrete from the static nature of the playbook. This is the production text: the play that belongs to subsequent performance, the cultural text set free to perform a range of political, aesthetic, and commercial work on a global stage.
The issues with purism are often made clearest in works that strive to achieve it. A common criticism of the BBC Shakespeare films, as outlined by Susan Willis in “The BBC Shakespeare Plays: Making the Televised Canon”, is that they feel the need to be definitive – to act, essentially, as a document testifying to the enduring dramatic power of Shakespeare. Often, this stance reduces the “pleasure principle” of the text by treading as close as possible to the expectation of what a Shakespeare play should be, choosing to forgo innovation in favour of retaining authenticity. “The generalisations about catcalls or yawns at dullness were not uncommon at the series’s end,” Willis wrote. “Certainly the charge of dullness, rephrased to suit individual critical temperaments, had been bandied about, especially early in the series.” This accusation, resulting – or so Willis believes – from the “false, churchy respect” with which Shakespeare is often treated reveals the underlying discourse behind all Shakespeare adaptations: namely, should the value system surrounding fidelity to the canon be questioned? When we describe something as authentic, is this simply a way of saying that it fits in with dominant cultural forms, rather than challenging preconceived ideas? This particular flavour of debate turns back on itself endlessly, devouring its own tail, and it soon it becomes clear that the struggle for true authenticity is inherently futile – not least because attempting to pin down one text as the source from which all others are born is a flawed endeavour. There is no "original" text in which “Troilus and Cressida” can be found. Instead, multiple narratives inform one another, creating a pastiche of different sources and influences in which nothing is left untouched (or "pure"). As Peter Brook commented in “Evoking Shakespeare”: “It is only by forgetting Shakespeare that we can begin to find him.”
At this juncture, it hardly seems necessary to point out that very little of Shakespeare's material was created in a vacuum. Fictionalised historical retellings aside, the bulk of Shakespearian narrative is constructed upon a centuries-deep foundation of well-known tales. “Romeo and Juliet”, for example, is based upon a sixteenth-century Italian poem titled “Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet”, which itself was retold five years later in prose form by William Painter; “King Lear” is likewise adapted from the pre-Roman legend of Leir, whose tale was first recounted by Geoffrey of Monmouth in 1136. “Troilus and Cressida” is no exception to this rule. The plot of Shakespeare’s play is by and large confluent with Chaucer’s poem – although there are several conspicuous diversions, the vast majority of which reflect changing attitudes towards conjugal fidelity and gender politics. Shakespeare emphasises the Elizabethan notion of “falseness”, whereas Chaucer’s far more sympathetic portrayal of Cressida places emphasis upon the fact that she remained faithful to Troilus in her heart: “Men seyn, I not, that she yaf him hir herte. / But trewely, the story telleth us, / Ther made never womman more wo / Than she, whan that she falsed Troilus.” Chaucer does state that at some point Cressida came to have affection for Diomedes, but professes ignorance as to when; this may indicate that although he was perfectly willing to make up sources, he would not reveal the part of the “source” which might have the capacity to alienate us from Cressida. Conversely, Shakespeare shows us Cressida submitting to Diomedes in two outside frames, and we are given no insight into her thought processes or motivations. In Shakespeare she is not seen as devalued by her father’s actions, whereas Chaucer’s Criseyde is far more vulnerable primarily because her father’s betrayal receives so much narrative emphasis. Ultimately, in Shakespeare Cressida is portrayed as much more of a tactician; she has the ability to turn down Diomedes, and a contemporary audience will recognise that and question why she did not. In light of these incongruities, it becomes apparent that our understanding of Cressida as a character cannot be whittled down to a singular paradigm. It is labile, entirely dependent upon the interpretation of the reader – and thus the sanctity of the text is dismantled, made obsolete.
Even when we limit our understanding of the characters to Shakespeare’s play alone, this mutability holds true. In Shakespeare’s play, Cressida is by and large seen from an outside perspective, her interior world closed off to us. This is a narrative choice that intentionally distances itself from Chaucer, who provides a speech in which Criseyde expresses doubts about giving up her agency (“Allas! Syn I am free, / Sholde I now love, and putte in jupartye / My sikernesse, and thrallen libertee?”) – a speech, incidentally, which Shakespeare removes with deliberate intention. However, Cressida’s elusiveness as a character only increases the play’s hermeneutical potential. One need only look at the performance history of “Troilus and Cressida” in order to see this enacted in a visible, tangible medium. Productions such as Joseph Papp’s staging at the New York Shakespeare Festival and Ngākau Toa’s Maori adaptation “A Toroihi rāua ko Kāhiri” consciously play up Cressida’s vulnerability, along with Ulysses’ Machiavellian tendencies and Troilus’ lack of emotional intelligence. Even when her supposed coquettishness is not a focal point, reviewers often seek to identify evidence of it when there is none. “In recent years there have been noticeable contortions to make elements of ‘The Shrew’ or ‘The Merchant’ palatable to contemporary liberal sensibilities, but nothing so crass as here perpetrated by Davies and his Cressida, Juliet Stevenson. They are unwilling to suggest that Cressida is either false or sluttish after the exchange with Antenor, and simply censor the play’s meaning without rewriting the words,” John Coveney wrote in a review of Howard Davies’ 1985 productions, adding, “It may be hard cheese on the RSC feminist puritans, but Shakespeare is writing about falsity and sexual wantonness, not rape.”
 Pandarus is another example of a character whose likeability (or lack thereof) is almost entirely determined by how his actor chooses to play him. In Eric Shanower’s graphic novel “Age of Bronze Volume 3B: Betrayal” he is an unrepentant schemer, corpulent and lecherous, using his niece’s feelings for Troilus as a means to gain power and social status. In “A Toroihi rāua ko Kāhiri”, however, he is far more benevolent: his actions spring from a genuine desire to see the young lovers united, and he respectfully allows them far more physical space to themselves than is common in other adaptations. (One might, for example, compare it to the BBC Shakespeare film directed by Jonathan Miller, in which Pandarus encroaches constantly upon the private space between Troilus and Cressida, his oppressive bulk commanding the viewer’s attention.) Whilst it may be hyperbolic to call Shakespeare’s characters blank slates, they are undeniably rich with revisionist possibility, demanding to be brought to life and reshaped in a variety of complex ways – primarily, as we have established, through the medium of performance.
It is thus clear that limiting the "actuality" of Troilus and Cressida to its text alone is reductive, stripping the play of its rich strata of re-interpretation, variation, and adaptation, whilst simultaneously ignoring the diverse source material that led to its composition. It may seem, then, that performance is where the true “Troilus and Cressida” can be found. If aspects as fundamental as characterisation and even plot can be so hugely affected by the decisions of actors and directors, then the text is surely only a single facet of the full image. Performance is, after all, an appropriately variable entity that has endured for centuries in a plethora of different forms. Not only that, but performance is able to add a new dimension to a centuries-old text, lending it a resonance particular to the context in which it is performed. Thus Julius Caesar becomes in turn any corrupt political leader that the audience needs him to be – here Benito Mussolini, with director Orson Welles outfitting his actors in Nazi-style uniforms; here Hillary Clinton in an all-female production by the Actors’ Shakespeare Project. In recent years Donald Trump has become a new candidate for the role, with the New York Public Theatre’s adaptation creating a deliberately staged likeness through Caesar’s costume and delivery. Breitbart produced an article shortly after the play premiered, headlined: “‘Trump’ Stabbed to Death in Central Park Performance of Julius Caesar”. Stylistic decisions of this vein emphasise the universality of Shakespeare’s plays – a universality that has been intentionally present ever since they were first composed. In Shakespeare, “then” is always “now”, and “there” is always “here”. “Troilus and Cressida” may be set in Ancient Troy, but it is also, in many ways, set in Elizabethan England. (For example, Hector briefly mentions Aristotle, although the play takes place centuries before he lived – and Aristotle was himself a scholar on the Trojan War. The play also employs a modern calendar system, mentioning “Friday” and “Sunday”, as opposed to the traditional Athenian calendar.) Anachronisms such as these allow “Troilus and Cressida” to remain, in Greenblatt’s words, “weirdly contemporary”.
Although “Troilus and Cressida” does not lend itself quite so easily to contemporary politics as plays like “Julius Caesar” and “Richard III”, there are several cases in which distinct parallels have been drawn between the situations of the play and events of the present moment. In Manning’s “The Great Fortune”, “Troilus and Cressida” is employed as an allegorical device, symbolising (at least in the context of the novel) the Second World War and its effect upon the civilian population. The Greeks are compared by Guy Pringle to "fascists", whilst the Trojans grow to implicitly represent England. Whilst the main relevance of the play is its in-universe function as a political mover, Manning’s novel itself is a sort of metanarrative. The similarities between Manning’s storyline and Harriet’s, as well as between Harriet’s situation and the situation that forms the central conflict of “Troilus and Cressida”, blur the boundaries between adaptation and embedded text appropriation. Shakespeare’s plays are timeless, constantly being reinterpreted and applied to the current climate; his avoidance of being direct and outspoken against his political enemies mean that his plays are always tacitly political, and as such easy to reappropriate. “Troilus and Cressida” as it is employed in “The Great Fortune” is therefore lent a new political meaning through the context in which it is performed. Ulysses functions as the Himmler-figure – a nefarious mastermind, working behind the scenes to achieve his goal. Achilles is Hitler, an interpretation strengthened by Shakespeare’s depiction of a loutish warrior driven not by honour, but by might. Beyond this, though, there are visible intradiegetic parallels that go unacknowledged by the characters (although the author herself is clearly aware of them, and takes it upon herself to draw the reader’s attention).
 	“Troilus and Cressida” represents something crucial for the English – a confrontation of their fear, an acknowledgment that the war may yet be lost, a reflection of Harriet’s own fear that her husband may be unfaithful to her. The play they put on is meant to be a form of escapism, but in many ways it is a direct reflection of their current crisis. In the words of Jeffrey Meyer, it “provides a dramatic analogy to the lives of the fictional characters in the novel and imposes aesthetic order on political chaos”. The fall of Paris is a disastrous moment for the protagonists, and the chapter in which it occurs is named “The Fall of Troy”, explicitly inviting us to link the two together; Troilus in Chaucer’s narrative threatens suicide, precisely as Sophie does; Ulysses’ “Fie, fie upon her!” speech is repurposed by Harriet, a misogynistic speech being placed in Sophie’s mouth (indicative of the internalisation of sexist beliefs, and involuntary participation in a heteropatriarchal narrative). Sophie herself is a Cressida figure – she marries Clarence and then leaves him immediately upon obtaining a British passport. She may also be seen as a Diomedes figure, tempting away the purportedly loyal spouse. Similarly, Yakimov can be seen as an archetype for Pandarus. Both are parasitic, living through others, overindulging in their chosen pastimes (gluttony in Yakimov’s case, sexual voyeurism in Pandarus’s). The relationship between the two is solidified when Yakimov agrees to act the Pandarus role in the play. Harriet notes snidely that very little acting is needed.
For the characters of “The Great Fortune”, then, “Troilus and Cressida” is undeniably located in performance. Through its transposition and assigned relevance, it becomes theirs; the original text, standing alone, does not carry the same weight as that self-same text being performed by refugees in the midst of a world war. It is notable that “Troilus and Cressida” is presented, in-universe, as a comedy – a narrative decision which reveals an unexpected amount about its purpose in the community, and the way the characters attempt to make a joke out of the war, effectively buttressing themselves with positive denial as the war rages on around them. In this way, Guy (and the cast of “Troilus and Cressida”) might be viewed as a metaphor for the way in which the upper-middle-class ignores social realities. Performance therefore has the power to alter not only the contextual relevance of “Troilus and Cressida”, but also its genre. This kind of power cannot be denied. Nor, however, can it be relied upon; and the issues with relying upon this sort of fluctuant medium are greater than they might initially appear.
If we acknowledge that the performance history of “Troilus and Cressida” is far tougher (and paradoxically far more elastic) than the comparative brittleness of its text, it is tempting to conclude that performance is where the real “spirit” of the play lies. Upon closer inspection, though, this argument is just as reductive as the attempt to locate “Troilus and Cressida” in text alone. “Troilus and Cressida”, like Shakespeare’s other plays, may defy one distinct textual source – but it is nonetheless a literary narrative, not a performance narrative. Performance may have the capacity to engineer change, but attempting to locate a play within such a fluctuant medium is an act of folly. The way events play out on the stage is unreliable, unpredictable; the actuality of a performance is transient, and cannot be traced. Even in productions that have been recorded and committed to digital archives, there is no certainty that what we are seeing is the “true” production. Although text might be rooted in history, performance is lost in time, shifting and metamorphosing in accordance with a near-infinite number of variables. Because performance has the status of an event, it is therefore caught between the present and the potential future, always either happening or about to happen. This is the “one-off” aspect of production – the phenomenon of one specific, singular performance, experienced only by a select few and rendered irreclaimable as soon as the curtain falls. It is an idea quite distinct from the term that is used generically to describe the actions and words of the cast, as well as the viewer/audience dynamic – but even this marginally more stable idea of “performance” is still inherently temporary. Even if a performance runs long-term, or is recorded and thus committed to the collective consciousness of the public, it is impossible to remain unconscious of the fact that what we are seeing is merely one small piece of the whole. A line that is present one night may be cut the next; the tone in which a speech is delivered will vary, whilst body language constantly shifts, conveying a variety of different dynamics and nuances. Even spectator response must be factored in, as a live audience has the capacity to alter the meaning of a line simply by responding to it.
	It may be the case, then, that “Troilus and Cressida” is found not in adaptation itself, but in the act of adaptation – more specifically, adaptation that re-interprets the canonical text and applies it to the present moment. In this way, a chorus of different voices come together to create a shared idea of Shakespeare’s play, a space in which various different cultures and histories collide. This perspective has its merits primarily because it does not limit our understanding of “Troilus and Cressida” to the binary notion of text versus performance. Adaptation is not simply a case of either/or; it does not endeavour to split “Troilus and Cressida” down the middle and relegate each half into a separate, arbitrary category of perceived importance. In adapting Shakespeare, it is crucial to establish a sort of symbiosis between text and performance, allowing them to feed into one another. However, this brings us to the thorny topic of what, precisely, adaptation is. In a literary sense, adaptation can be defined as the reinterpretation of a text (usually by means of simplifying it, displaying it from another point of view, trimming it, switching the point of focus, or altering the medium). Whilst this might seem a straightforward method of categorisation, it is somewhat complicated by the question of how much of the “original source” can be simplified, trimmed, or altered before it becomes something else entirely.
To unpack the concept of adaptation is to acknowledge that it contains multiple categories within itself, each with a different relationship to the source. One of these categories is transposition – which is, as the name suggests, the act of transposing the source to a different genre or medium, often employing proximation in the process. “Age of Bronze” is one such example of this; it transposes the text of Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida” into the format of a graphic novel, whilst retaining the elements that make it recognisable. A second form of adaptation is commentary, which integrates socio-political criticism into the original canon – often by drawing attention to aspects of the text that offer the possibility of reinterpretation. An early example might be John Dryden’s “Truth Found Too Late”, a didactic sequel to “Troilus and Criseyde” that passes moral judgement upon Criseyde’s act of infidelity. (Whilst this is a work quite distinct from, and set after, Shakespeare’s canon, it nonetheless earns its place in the realm of “commentary” due to the author’s purported intention to mine certain truths supposedly hidden within the original text. As Dryden put it: “I undertook to remove that heap of rubbish, under which many excellent thoughts lay wholly buried.”) Finally we come to analogue, a form of adaptation that is not explicitly linked to the source text. Analogue is arguably the knottiest form of adaptation to pin down, as it frequently stands alone and is related to the source material only tangentially. The recent trend of high-school adaptations of Shakespeare texts, such as “She’s the Man” and “Ten Things I Hate About You”, function as analogue principally because they abandon the poetic language of Shakespeare, instead adopting the plot and characters as a conduit through which the narrative can be adequately conveyed.
It might reasonably be argued that a Shakespeare adaptation which uses none of Shakespeare’s words is not an adaptation at all, but merely a work influenced by Shakespeare. Where, then, may we draw the line? This brand of logic dictates that the line between adaptation and influence is defined in terms of authenticity. Therefore, for the sake of consistency it seems to demand that an adaptation which cuts out parts of the text, or alters their position (as the Barbican production of “Hamlet” did, placing the “to be or not to be” speech in the prologue as opposed to the third act), cannot be taken seriously. This is an argument which becomes, much like the argument for purism, a victim of its own rigidity. By establishing concrete rules for what adaptation is or is not, it boxes itself in, discounting the vast majority of Shakespearean adaptations on the basis that they do not conform to a misplaced idea of “authenticity”. In scientific terms, adaptation is an active process; animals adapt to their culture in order to survive and reproduce. Adaptation in literature therefore ought to be viewed similarly: not simply as imitation, but as expansion. In our current culture, it is befitting to understand the relationship between source and adaptation as equal and interconnected, rather than linear and historicised – and by doing so, to redefine our flawed notions of “fidelity”. The boundaries between influence and adaptation are and always will be malleable; an adaptation does not merely imitate the source, but rather refracts it.
Here the notion of appropriation enters into the equation. Appropriation is similar to analogue in that it breaks away from the source and becomes an independent product. Whilst an appropriation can still be read alongside the original text, the relationship between the two is far more distant and complex. Embedded text appropriations can be read alone, but are lent a deeper meaning when one understands the references to the original; “West Side Story” is one potential example of this. Conversely, sustained appropriations may cross-reference other adaptations, or take part in interplay with the source material (sometimes in the form of metafiction/narrative within narrative). They are frequently polyphonic, blurring the line between plagiarism and homage. In bygone times it was more acceptable to borrow stories or ideas from previous authors, but modern notions of copyright have emphasised the need for either total originality or total acknowledgement of the source material. An example of a sustained appropriation might be T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”, which cherry-picks liberally from poets throughout the ages – from Chaucer to Donne to Shakespeare, interweaving their words with his own until they come together to form something new and alive.
Given the slipperiness of the idea of “adaptation”, as well as the significant overlap it shares with influence, appropriation, and analogue, it is difficult to say with any certainty that the act of adaptation is where “Troilus and Cressida” may be found. Certainly the idea allows for greater flexibility than simple adherence to the rigid binary of either “text” or “performance”, but the difficulty of defining what is or is not adaptation complicates the matter too much for this to be feasible. Douglas Hickox’s 1973 film “Theatre of Blood”, for example, contains a scene directly inspired by “Troilus and Cressida” in which Hector is killed by the Trojans and dragged behind their horses. Few would consider the film to be an adaptation of “Troilus and Cressida”, and yet here is a clear instance of appropriation. Can Hickox then be said to have adapted, at least in part, “Troilus and Cressida” – and thus contributed towards locating it? This seems generous at best, and assigns a fundamentally unequal share of influence over the play to creators who do not truly adapt, but merely borrow.
The most accurate mode of thought, then, seems to be that “Troilus and Cressida” is found in the overall dispute that takes place regarding authenticity, and the ongoing tug-of-war between source material and adaptation. This negotiation of genre, character, plot, and adaptation, and the resulting aggregation of voices and opinions, defines “Troilus and Cressida” more completely than the simple notions of text, performance, and adaptation. Or in simpler terms: the argument about where “Troilus and Cressida” can be found is where it can be found. What matters is not the play itself, but the discussion which takes place around it. Shakespeare’s source text (if it even can be considered the source text) is far too nebulous to hold the full weight of “Troilus and Cressida”; the performances that have taken place throughout history are too widely varied, and too difficult to trace, for us to locate it there either. Adaptation is, as we have established, problematic in a variety of ways – and claiming that it is only through the act of adaptation that “Troilus and Cressida” can be found disregards the text itself, without which there would be no play at all. It can only be concluded that the dialogue that has surrounded “Troilus and Cressida” since its conception, and the interdependence of each of its aspects, are its defining qualities, and the reason the paly has endured until this day. This notion is upheld by the fact that Shakespeare himself did not write about any specific time or place, but rather about a universal time and place that served as a channel through which basic human concerns could be filtered and amplified. Troy in this play is not simply Troy. It is England too, and wherever else the reader requires it to be. Shakespeare is writing not simply for us, but about us; and it is precisely this which allows his work to reach across the ages, constantly in flux, constantly being reformed and re-applied to the current historical moment.