SOURCE: "Troilus and Cressida: The Disjunctive Imagination," in ELH, Vol. 36, No. 1, March, 1969, pp. 145-67.

In the essay below, Stein examines Shakespeare's use of dramatic imagination in Troilus and Cressida, and places the play within the genre of tragedy, calling it 'our most helpful definition of the play. "

The dramatic experience we get from Troilus and Cressida is hard to place in relation to our memory of the experience we get from other plays. I am thinking in particular of the unsparing consistency of this play, of its texture, of its dark side without depth or vehemence, of the general destruction that does not find significant victims. The play has about it the quality of a nightmare we have somehow got used to, because it was translated long ago into the familiar and the everyday.

We must make, as with any play, an effort to learn the particular language...