SOURCE: "Shakespeare and Satirical Comedy," in Shakespeare, the Dark Comedies to the Last Plays: From Satire to Celebration, University Press of Virginia, 1971, pp. 7-62.

In the excerpt below, Foakes examines the presence of satire in Troilus and Cressida and analyzes the "three strands which interweave to create the pattern and tonality of the play": war, love, and humor.

Plays which balance on the knife-edge of satire are especially liable to thematic and tonal misreadings, but attention to the dramatic shape and context of Troilus and Cressida confirms the view of the commentator in the quarto that it is 'passing full of the palm comical'. It is to simplify too crudely to suppose that Shakespeare wrote this play directly within a convention of 'comical satire' as established by Jonson, but it does seem clear that he learned much from Jonson and Marston, using techniques they had developed in a...