SOURCE: "Longing and Homesickness: Troilus and Cressida," in Shakespeare and Tragedy, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981, pp. 96-117.

Below, Bayley contends that in the tragic atmosphere of Troilus and Cressida "the fact of experience and the saving ability to cherish it, change it, build upon it, are kept apart. "

Troilus and Cressida is the other tragedy [along with Timon of Athens] in which Shakespeare neither offers the tragic study of personality nor creates the mind that personifies the play. Unlike Timon it is too early to have been influenced by Jonson's major new-style plays, though it refers to The Poetaster, the satiric play of Jonson's performed in 1601. That year or the next is the probable date of Troilus, making it one of the earliest tragedies, excepting Romeo and Juliet, written six or seven years earlier, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet, produced probably the year before.

In many ways it is as...