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Troilus & Cressida
Troilus & Cressida
Troilus & Cressida
Audiobook3 hours

Troilus & Cressida

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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About this audiobook

Troilus and Cressida is set during the latter years of the Trojan War, faithfully following the plotline of the Iliad from Achilles' refusal to participate in battle to Hector's death. This full-cast dramatization is performed by The Marlowe Society.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 5, 2009
ISBN9781907818516
Troilus & Cressida
Author

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare is widely regarded as the greatest playwright the world has seen. He produced an astonishing amount of work; 37 plays, 154 sonnets, and 5 poems. He died on 23rd April 1616, aged 52, and was buried in the Holy Trinity Church, Stratford.

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Reviews for Troilus & Cressida

Rating: 3.4366196950704224 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

284 ratings16 reviews

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5

    This is yet another novel which would not have come to my attention but for Goodreads and I would not have chosen to read it had it not been for the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the book of my Goodreads friends. I'm so glad that I did.

    For me, the most compelling aspect of the novel is what it says about our society. From the idea that rich and powerful people live on what is produced by poor people far away, to the concept of people being entertained by a reality television program the objective of which is survival at the expense of other contestants, to the depiction of a great “sporting” contest in which the success or failure of the contestants depends on their ability to attract wealthy sponsors, to the use of children killing other children as a weapon of control, these are all things that happen in the real world, right now. Certainly, the images are exaggerated*, but this only brings the reality of our world into sharper relief.

    I was engaged with the narrative from the very beginning. Although initially disappointed with Carolyn McCormick’s narration – I don’t think she does a great job with a number of the characters - I left my irritation with the narrator behind and fully entered the world of the novel. The details of the world are clever. For example, the depiction of the relationship between the Capitol and the Districts as akin to the relationship between ancient Rome and its empire is simply but effectively achieved by calling children who are sent to the Capitol to fight to the death in the Hunger Games “tributes” and by giving the Capitol’s inhabitants Latin names.

    Collins has also done well with the development of her characters. The novel is narrated by the sixteen-year-old heroine, Katniss Everdeen to whom Collins gives a very believable voice. Katniss is prickly, sullen and quite clueless about her own emotions, but she is smart, loyal and resourceful. It is interesting to watch her grow from resigned acceptance of the system in which she lives in general and of the Hunger Games in particular, to clarity about what those things represent, culminating in her light bulb moment, when she refers to the killing at the Hunger Games by its correct name - murder. Other characters are also well realised. This is particularly true of Haymitch, the alcoholic mentor and former Hunger Games champion, who shows the classic signs of a veteran with combat stress reaction.

    Successfully pulling off a first person, present tense narrative is no easy feat, given that the point of view has to remain solely that of the narrator. Collins achieves this without faltering. While Katniss speculates about what she can’t see and doesn’t know, the perspective remains hers. Even within the limitations imposed by this narrative style, Collins is able to let the reader know more than her heroine is aware of.

    As is to be expected from the subject matter, the novel contains graphic descriptions of violence. However, there is nothing about this which either encourages or glorifies violence - quite the contrary. The horrific situation in which the participants in the Hunger Games find themselves speaks for itself. Making choices in situations of adversity, friendship, loyalty and above all, what it means to be human are what the novel is really about.

    Overall, I found this audiobook riveting to listen to. The only reason I’m glad not to have read the book when it was first published is that I can go on to the second volume of the trilogy without delay.

    *There is no exaggeration in relation to the issue of children killing children. The plight of child soldiers has had a lot of exposure in social media in recent times. A friend of mine who works for the United Nations was posted in Uganda a few years ago, where his task was to re-unite child soldiers from the Lord’s Resistance Army with their families and communities. The sheer horror of what those children experienced trumps any fictional account of violence committed by and against children.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I didn't think that Shakespeare, one of my favorite authors, was even capable of writing a bad play. However, this one is far from perfect, especially when compared to his other works."Troilus and Cressida" is about a young man, Troilus, and his lover, Cressida. It is set during the Trojan War, and among other characters are the recognizable Achilles, Hector, Helen, and others.However, the main character's love story never seems very convincing. Troilus is constantly praising his beloved highly, while another character does his best to convince him of her low morals. And, the characters are never together all that often. Most of their supposed "romance" is via them talking or thinking about each other in separate scenes. The character of Cressida is not very built up at all. It takes a few scenes for her to enter the story, and once she does, virtually nothing about her is revealed. One catches fleeting glimpses of a feisty nature, but other than this, all we seem to really know of Cressida is that she is beautiful (as proclaimed by Troilus over and over). Shakespeare even goes so far as to say that her beauty rivals that of Helen's. I kept waiting for Shakespeare to focus a bit more on his female character, yet he never did. As a result, the love story here is not a very convincing one.Another thing that I disliked about this play was how much dialogue there was. About half the book was simply talking - and not about anything interesting, unless you love hearing about endless politics, battle strategies, and so on. These things can be interesting, but in this Renaissance play, they seemed oddly out of place. I couldn't resist skimming over them slightly, wondering where Troilus has gone to. These endless talks are not involved with the book's plot in any major way, save that the Trojan War is its setting, of course. They also seem to lead nowhere, and are simply dry and dull. I had never before seen Shakespeare write such dreadfully tedious scenes.And besides the endless talking, I disliked the ending, in which Cressida is caught being unfaithful by Troilus. After that, she simply disappears altogether! She is not brought back into the story again for the entire book, besides when a letter arrives from her. All in all, I disliked this one - something I was sure I would never say about a Shakespeare play.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is the last text, chronologically, in the class I read it for, but it was the easiest to get hold of. I actually read a version with no notes or glosses, so it'll probably be interesting to go through an annotated version. Obviously I was aware of the story on the Trojan War -- unavoidable when you take Classics for GCSE and A Level -- but I didn't know much about this one.

    People are right to categorise this as a 'problem play'. It generally doesn't work to try and put things into hard and fast categories -- just look at the problems with Anglo-Saxon elegies/lyric poems -- but it can be useful. But this one defies all the categories: comedy? Tragedy? History...? None of that seems quite right.

    It's Shakespeare, though, so it's bound to be worth reading. I'm looking forward to meeting Shakespeare's sources, and getting to know them better. (I am generally against studying Shakespeare and Chaucer, in my own work, as I feel they're... overdone. Maybe even over stressed, though it's hard to overestimate Shakespeare's impact. Still, I'm very excited about this module.)
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This was an excellent reading of this play. The play itself, was not one of Shakespeare's best, as I am reading through all of his plays. It is a retelling of Chaucer's book. Though even a bad Shakespeare's play is still excellent. This audiobook does an excellent job bringing it to life.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Blissful scholarly edition of this play. For new readers, I'd recommend the Penguin or the Oxford, but the Arden really is number one for professionals and scholars.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins is a very suspensful book. It is very descriptive so you can picture what is happening. It is mainly about a 16 year old girl named Katniss. She took her younger sister's place in the Hunger Games.Twenty- four tributes will be in the arena fighting for their life, but there can only be one victor. Who will make it out alive?
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I just didn't get this one. I tried print and audio and ended up going back to print to read the whole thing, but I still couldn't tell you much of anything that I read. I know my eyes moved across the page, but for some reason the words just refused to sink in. Possibly part of the problem is that I detest Ancient Greek history. I've never enjoyed it. However, I really liked Margaret George's novel Helen of Troy, so I thought I'd be okay here. I wasn't. I know it was a cultural norm both in Shakespeare's time and it seems to still be a norm today, but women being treated as property is a theme that angers me. The way Cressida was treated makes my blood boil, and I didn't see anything in her behavior that justified the label of "whore". Again, I obviously missed the message of the play. I didn't like any of the characters. I found no humor in the story. But, I finished, so I can check another of Shakespeare's plays off my to-read list.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A landmark for me. In this “Year of Reading All the Shakespeare,” this play, the twenty-first in the list, is the first one that I'd never read before and really enjoyed. To me, Titus Andronicus was a pointless gorefest, Two Gentlemen of Verona was just dumb, and King Edward III was simply incoherent, but this – well, it's not great – not a Hamlet or Macbeth or Richard II – but it's very good. While I'm quite familiar with the Iliad, the story of Troilus and Cressida was new to me. Aside from knowing that they were famous “sundered lovers,” I came to their story pretty much cold. So now I'm curious about Chaucer's take on their tale. Shakespeare keeps to tradition with some characters – Hector is noble, Ulysses is crafty, Nestor is … verbose – but several “regulars” lose the sheen they generally have and are merely (if fairly plausibly) thugs (or, in Helen's case, a “floozy”). Achilles in particular, comes off dreadfully. Thersites, though, who I didn't even remember from the Iliad, is transformed from “nonentity” in Homer to a vividly realized dynamo of evil in Shakespeare's play. His equal opportunity hatred for everyone and everything – Greek or Trojan, male or female – is almost overwhelming in its intensity. Pandarus, another character from the Iliad I'd completely forgotten about, is also memorable in Shakespeare's telling, though in his case it is his sheer creepiness that makes him stand out. Marjorie Garber, in her brilliant Shakespeare After All, points out Pandarus's similarities to Juliet's nurse (in Romeo and Juliet), but, while the nurse is certainly foolish and shows an unwholesome enthusiasm for her young charge's deflowering, her prurience is nothing next to that of Cressida's uncle. Pandarus's eagerness to put his niece and the Trojan prince in bed together and his salacious comments in regard to their activities there are impressively icky. Cressida, unattractive though she is (except physically, I suppose) is at least interesting. A practical girl, with no illusions about her status as an object to be sold. The frequent comparisons between Helen and Cressida, so similar in appearance that the only difference is said to be that Cressida's hair is a shade darker, highlight the hypocrisies of their varying treatments. As Troilus says in the meeting over whether to return Helen and thus end the war...”Were it not glory that we more affectedThan the performance of our heaving spleens,I would not wish a drop of Trojan bloodSpent more in her defense. But, worthy Hector,She is a theme of honor and renown,A spur to valiant and magnanimous deeds,Whose present courage may beat down our foes,And fame in time to come canonize us”Cressida, however, is traded to the Greeks in return for a captured Trojan leader without a second thought (we are spared the scene where Paris prances around Priam's palace teasing Troilus with a rousing rendition of “Mom and Dad and everyone love me best!). Poor Troilus. He gets marquee status, but his character is distinctly lacking in pizazz. The play's “Ken doll,” he gets the girl, only to immediately lose her to a more powerful, more interesting man. Oh well. Their long term prospects weren't promising anyway.Along with reading the Folger Shakespeare Library edition, which has reasonable size print and fine notes, I listened to the Arkangel recording of this play, which is very well done. Recommended.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    You know what I just don't get this play. Apparently a lot of people don't get it and it's labeled one of the "problem plays", but you know what, Timon of Athens was one of those too and that play made perfect sense to me. But this one.. just seems like a bunch of random shit that happens. Looking at the wikipedia writeup (which is not really the best source for this kind of information) I see it suggested that the joke is that a variety of conventionally epic tragedies are set up, and then subverted by either not resolving themselves or resolving themselves in the sort of petty venal way they'd happen in real life. In retrospect I can kind of sort of see that but it's not funny to me. Also the structure/pacing is really bizarre. Practically nothing happens in the first four acts and then the fifth act has like a dozen scenes and takes up a third of the page count.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Shakespeare's brutal and brilliant deconstruction of the Iliad is one of the most enjoyable surprises I've had in reading. Achilles is a brute and a fraud. Ajax is a chivalrous dunce. Agamemnon is a cipher. Menelaus is just a cuckold. Ulysses and Nestor are puppeteers whose main military virtue is their ability to manipulate the two strongmen. Thersites isn't a troublemaker but the most bitter of Shakespeare's jesters, tolerated by the powerful Grecians instead of beaten. Hector on the other hand is even nobler than he was in the Iliad and is murdered in the most cowardly way imaginable.Nothing is more surprising that the characters of the star crossed lovers, whose story ends with the woman changing her heart with her fortune and her enraged former lover consigning her to blazes and becoming a cruel killing machine. The play thus ends not with the tragic deaths of the lovers but with Cressida's pandering uncle complaining about the physical ailments his career has caused him.Did I say that Shakespeare was deconstructing Homer? On second thought, Shakespeare was deconstructing Shakespeare.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    ** spoiler alert **This is a pretty good play. It doesn't fit the usual categories, being filled with comic scenes and speeches but following with an abrupt bleak ending. I found the dialogue throughout to be entertaining and clever, and the spoof of the Iliad very funny. The eponymous love affair is satirical. Troilus is a narcissistic and wordy brat, and Cressida a rather winning girl who can't say no. The love affair is at best a subplot to the Iliad satire, and it's most entertaining character the go-between Pandarus, who remarks that his name will be inherited by all panders to follow. Most of the main Iliad characters are presented satirically. All ends in a lengthy battle with many short scenes of individual combat, ending with the death of Hector in a rather unheroic attack by Achilles and his Myrmidons. Then a final comic soliloquy by Pandarus. If you like bawdy Shakespeare there is a lot of it here, including a large stock of gay humor in the Greek camp.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is one of Shakespeare's problem plays, meaning it doesn't fit neatly into the category of tragedy or comedy, but occupies its own hybrid niche. "Black comedy" or "scathing satire" would probably be a fairly apt description for this outing. It's actually a lot of fun to read, especially if you like humor flavored with a heavy dose of cynicism.The "romantic" leads of the play's title, Troilus and Cressida, are no Romeo and Juliet. Not even by a long shot. Troilus is a superficial lad, concerned only with glory and momentary pleasures, and his love for Cressida lasts only about as long as her maidenhood. Cressida is just as fickle as her lover, swiftly shifting her physical affections to the enemy camp when she gets traded for ransom. This play is very anachronistic. It's not the sort of tale that resides in the ancient dusty battles of Greek times; it's very much a product of Shakespeare's era. This is what makes it such an interesting read for me. It reflects the rapidly changing world of a burgeoning global market, a place where chaos, hypocrisy, and corruption were rife. There are numerous references in the play to venereal disease, especially the notorious pox (syphilis), which was just beginning its lengthy reign in Europe.I do love it when Shakespeare gets gross, and he obliges his disgusting side with unapologetic alacrity here. "Thou crusty botch of nature", "thou sarsenet flap for a sore eye", and so on.. Shakespeare is a demigod when it comes to heinous insults, and Troilus and Cressida is brimful of humdingers.I also love Shakespeare plays for the treasure-trove of words, some of which should still be in use instead of being consigned to obscurity.Two words from this play that caught my fancy:Oppugnancy - meaning opposition. I like its bouncy character, like a rubber ball on the tongue.Gloze - a verb meaning to comment, make excuses for, or to use ingratiating language.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I've read all of Shakespeare's tragedies and "Troilus and Cressida" is definitely my least favorite by far. Set during the seventh year of the Trojan War, the play sprinkles a little bit of everything from romance to battle, but mostly focuses on people taunting each other. Much of action happens off-stage in the fifth act, as the actors dash on stage to mutter a few taunts and then leap off to fight with their swords. (As written anyway... I've never seen it performed.)Overall, I felt that Shakespeare took a story told so well in "The Iliad" (with the addition of a couple of star-crossed lovers) and made it boring. It didn't help that there seemed to be no motivation for Cressida's quick betrayal. Anyway, there are loads of Shakespeare's plays that feature similar set ups that are much better than this.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    “She is a pearl, whose price hath launch'd above a thousand ships.” The story of the Trojan War and the beautiful Helen is well-known, but this Shakespearean tragedy about it is not. Troilus and Cressida is the story of two young Trojans caught in the midst of a nation at war. Despite being surrounded by the problems of others they find themselves falling in love. Troilus is the brother of the infamous warrior Hector and the lovesick Paris who ran away with the married Helen, incurring the wrath of the Greeks. The entire play is filled with passionate declarations of both love and war. The Greeks, like King Agamemnon and the hotheaded Ajax, are itching for a fight. Ajax doesn’t realize until too late that he is only a pawn in the hands of the generals. The Trojans on the other hand aren’t sure how they want to respond. Paris wants to defend Helen’s honor, but his older brother Hector has to decide if she is worth the fall of an entire nation. From his opening scene he has an impossible task. He knows the right thing to do in theory, but the obligations of honor and family loyalty prevent him from doing it. The play is full to the brim with remarkable supporting characters. From the tragic Cassandra, whose prophetic wails go unheeded to Pandarus, Cressida’s uncle the meddling matchmaker. I was surprised to find one of the most poignant wooing scenes I’ve ever come across in a play. Usually the man takes the lead in these scenes, but in this one a guarded Cressida finally reveals how much she cares for Troilus. She been attempting to play hard to get, but she can’t hide her feelings any more. She gushes then quickly chides herself, finally begging him to kiss her so she’ll stop talking. “And yet, good faith, I wish'd myself a man; Or that we women had men's privilege Of speaking first. Sweet, bid me hold my tongue; For, in this rapture, I shall surely speak The thing I shall repent. See, see ! your silence, Cunning in dumbness, from my weakness draws My very soul of counsel: Stop my mouth.”This is a tricky play though because there are so many different plots. There’s the romance between Troilus and Cressida and another one between Paris and Helen. There’s the central story of war between nations. In the midst of all of this the title characters often feel secondary, which can make it hard to become invested in their relationship. The title may be Troilus and Cressida, but that’s really a misnomer. While their romance is sweet, it’s truly the story of the Trojan War and the dicey decisions that warriors must face in battle. What is a single life worth? For Achilles, his love for one man is enough to make him fight or to stay his hand. For the love of his brothers Hector is willing to pick up his sword. The tragedy of war is that it’s a cyclical game; one death always leads to the desire for vengeance from the other side. Grief and bloodshed fuel only more of the same and this play is a poignant reminder of that.BOTTOM LINE: A powerful story of the destructive force of war intertwined with a doomed love story. Bard enthusiasts must read it.  
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a cynical version of incidents in the Trojan war. An over-romantic Troilus thinks he is in love with Cressida. (She has the part of a life time.) She is young, sexy, flirtatious and aware of her need to make our for herself while the time is ripe. She is traded to the Greeks for a warrior and immediately starts flirting. Troilus is devasted by this when he sees her behavior. The other incident is Achilles' murder of Hector. It is ugly.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is one of my favorites of Shakespeare's work. It's been a LONG time since I've read it, so I plan to reread it at some point.